Laplanche characterises this demand as one of translation, a process that drives the structural development of selfhood, and one that he uses to posit an elaboration of Freud’s structural model of the soul. To this end, Laplanche (2007) describes a sub-conscious enclave that functions as a kind of working register, a mode of being by which the intromitted unconscious message is actively engaged in an attempt at assimilation. To the extent that a meaningful translation is effected, a coherent-enough sense of selfhood – to paraphrase Winnicott – is consolidated in the guise of the ego proper, leaving over, conversely, a remainder or sediment of that which escapes or exceeds translation; a sediment that coalesces to form the matrix for the structure of the unconscious. In other words, indigestible bits of the message are repressed, forming the basis of the structure of neurosis, resulting in an enigmatic signifier that represents a persistent aspect of the alien-ness described above. It is here, in this moment of translation with its attendant repression and generation of the enigmatic signifier that Laplanche locates the second moment of transference.
Where there is too great a failure of translation of the first moment of transference, where what has been intromitted remains overwhelmingly incomprehensible and insistent, beyond translation and therefore (partial) representation, the infant’s handling is reduced to a holding. The resulting enigmatic signifier, that is, is sequestered within the sub-conscious enclave—like a foreign word or phrase within a language—representing a second and more disturbing site of an alien-ness within the structure of selfhood in the developing child; an alien–ness that is, in its origins, fundamentally other, ‘an alien inside … put inside me by an alien’ (Laplanche, 1999:65). Such a sequestering of an incomprehensible and threatening enigmatic signifier is on the side of the defence of foreclosure, and forms the basis for a psychotic structure of selfhood.
Here then we see an elaboration of Freud’s notion of an originary imago of an individual’s familial relational dynamics. The scene of primal seduction in Laplanche’s model does not encode a concrete situation, to be remembered more or less accurately—a remembering against which Freud asserts the neurotic fights—but rather it is one that represents an encounter with an existentially unfathomable aspect of the human condition, always/already situated in relation to repressed sexual desire. It is on this latter basis that the encounter with the analyst evokes the analysand’s relation to the originary other, provoking the alienating effects of the failure of translation; the dynamics of the unconscious proper and the still-encysted aspects of the sub-conscious enclave; the regression to neurotic repression and psychotic foreclosure respectively.