Laplanche’s Refounding
In his project of formulating new foundations in psychoanalysis, Laplanche (1989) privileges the Freudian perspective as the founding theory of psychoanalysis. His approach entails a ‘calling into question’ of the principle themes – such as transference – of Freudian psychoanalysis, with the purpose of constructing new theoretical foundations, grounded – like Freud – in clinical experience, but also informed by decades of philosophical and psychoanalytical critique. In this regard, Laplanche subjects Freudian theory to a scrutiny that characterises something of a postmodern sensibility, by which the tensions and inconsistencies of classical theory are drawn out to destabilise the theory as a master discourse, and open up a space for new conceptual possibilities (Leary, 1994).
Laplanche characterises Freud’s reasoning as having ‘gone astray’ at the point where he abandoned his theory of seduction. Principally, he argues that Freud was himself seduced by the essentialist promise of a centring – or, rather a re-centring – of the subject. Thus the victory of battle is meant to produce a restored subject who has recovered and re-assimilated ‘something in me which I’ve split off from, denied’ (Laplanche, 1999:67); that is, a subject who has mastered the irrational unconscious and has become (again) master in and of his or her own house. For Laplanche, this taming of the unconscious betrays a radical consequence of Freud’s discovery; that hysterics do not suffer from a forgetting, but rather – highlighted in Freud’s use of the term ‘reminiscences’ – from the return of something as if from elsewhere, something that always was and is fundamentally other, enigmatically alien; something, that is, that will not be domesticated.
Taking each of the points of the previous section in turn, let us see how Laplanche’s attempt to address some of the critiques outlined are transformed in this Laplanchian reformulation of the notion and handling of transference.