Jean Laplanche is a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 author, theorist and psychoanalyst

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development

Psychosexual development

In Freudian psychology, psychosexual development is a central element of the psychoanalytic sexual drive theory, that human beings, from birth, possess an instinctual libido that develops in five stages. Each stage — the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital — is characterized...

 and Sigmund Freud's

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 seduction theory, and has written more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory

Psychoanalytic theory

Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...

. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as "the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day."

Since 1988, Jean Laplanche has been the scientific director of the German to French translation of Freud's complete works (Oeuvres Complètes de Freud / Psychanalyse — OCF.P) in the Presses Universitaires de France.

Early

Laplanche grew up in the Côte d'Or

Côte-d'Or

Côte-d'Or is a department in the eastern part of France.- History :Côte-d'Or is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was formed from part of the former province of Burgundy.- Geography :...

 region of France. In his adolescence he was active in Catholic Action

Catholic Action

Catholic Action was the name of many groups of lay Catholics who were attempting to encourage a Catholic influence on society.They were especially active in the nineteenth century in historically Catholic countries that fell under anti-clerical regimes such as Spain, Italy, Bavaria, France, and...

, a left-wing social justice organization. Laplanche attended the École Normale Supérieure

École Normale Supérieure

The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...

 in the 1940s, studying philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

. He was a student of Jean Hyppolite

Jean Hyppolite

Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers....

, Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...

 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...

. In 1943, during the Vichy regime, Laplanche joined the French Resistance

French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

, and was active in Paris and Bourgogne. In 1946-47, he visited Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 for a year. Instead of joining that university's philosophy department, he instead studied at the Department of Social Relations, and became interested in psychoanalytic theory. Upon returning to France, Laplanche began attending lectures and undergoing psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...

. Laplanche, advised by Lacan, began studying medicine, and eventually earned his doctorate and became an analyst himself, joining the International Psychoanalytical Association

International Psychoanalytical Association

The International Psychoanalytical Association is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, on an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi...

, of which he remains a member.

Laplanche continued his political activity. In 1948, Laplanche was one of the founding members of the organization Socialisme ou Barbarie

Socialisme ou Barbarie

Socialisme ou Barbarie was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period . It existed from 1948 until 1965...

(Socialism or Barbarism) after breaking with Trotskyism

Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...

, but notes that the group's "atmosphere soon became impossible", due to the influence of Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.-Early life in Athens:...

, who "exerted hegemony over the journal." Nevertheless, Laplanche remained "in favour of the thesis of Socialisme ou Barbarie" until 1968.

Winemaking in Pommard

Laplanche has also for many years run Chateau de Pommard, a French vineyard, together with his wife Nadine.
Chateau de Pommard is a 50 acres (202,343 m²) winery in Burgundy, and has the longest continuous vineyard in the Côte-d'Or

Côte-d'Or

Côte-d'Or is a department in the eastern part of France.- History :Côte-d'Or is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was formed from part of the former province of Burgundy.- Geography :...

 region. The Laplanches lived on the estate and made wine for a number of years. In 2003, the couple sold the estate to new owners. The deal included an agreement that the Laplanches would remain on the estate and continue for some time to participate in the winemaking process. Their wine has been advertised as "the only wine in the world grown and bottled by an old disciple of Lacan's."

Laplanche and his wife were interviewed, about both wine and psychoanalysis, in Agnès Varda's

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....

 documentary The Gleaners and I

The Gleaners and I

The Gleaners and I is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features various kinds of gleaning. It was entered into competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival , and later went on to earn awards around the world....

.

Nadine Laplanche died in spring 2010.

Since 2010, Jean Laplanche seems to live exclusively in Pommard.

The psychoanalyst, the scientific man and the academic

Jean Laplanche is one of the founders of the Association Psychanalytique de France (1964) and served also as its president in 1969-1971. He is now an honorary member of this Association with J.-B. Pontalis and Guy Rosolato.

Laplanche has been granted honorary doctorates from the University of Lausanne

University of Lausanne

The University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of theology, before being made a university in 1890. Today about 12,000 students and 2200 researchers study and work at the university...

 (1986), the University of Buenos Aires

University of Buenos Aires

The University of Buenos Aires is the largest university in Argentina and the largest university by enrollment in Latin America. Founded on August 12, 1821 in the city of Buenos Aires, it consists of 13 faculties, 6 hospitals, 10 museums and is linked to 4 high schools: Colegio Nacional de Buenos...

, and the University of Athens. He was the winner of the Mary S. Sigourney Award (1995). Laplanche was also made a Knight of Arts and Letters in 1990.

Jean Laplanche is presently Emeritus Professor of the University of Paris, where he taught from 1970 till 1993: he introduced the teaching of psychoanalysis in the "U.E.R. des Sciences Humaines Cliniques" in Paris VII and brought it to the level of research; he supervised theses of students, who are now teaching "psychoanalysis in the university" (title of the research-review founded by Jean Laplanche: 1975-1994) in France and elsewhere in the world (especially in Latin America).

Work

Laplanche published his first book in 1961. The following year, he was invited to a position at the Sorbonne

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

 by Daniel Lagache. Since then, Laplanche has maintained a regular publication schedule. Together with colleague Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Laplanche in 1967 published The Language of Psycho-Analysis, which has become a standard encyclopedic reference on psychoanalysis. It was translated into English in 1973, and its thirteenth French edition was published in 1997. Laplanche was president of the Association Psychoanalytique de France from 1969 to 1971, being succeeded by Pontalis. His seminars have been published in the seven volume Problématiques series while many of his most important essays are found in La révolution copernicienne inachevée (1992).

Seduction theory

One of his major contributions to psychoanalysis consists of the théorie de la séduction généralisée (theory of the general seduction, 1987). Of his work on Freud's seduction theory, he says,

[M]y job has been to show why Freud missed some very important points in this theory. But before saying that we must revise the theory, we must know it. And I think that ignorance concerning the seduction theory causes people to go back to something pre-analytic. By discussing the seduction theory we are doing justice to Freud, perhaps doing Freud better justice than he did himself. He forgot the importance of his theory, and its very meaning, which was not just the importance of external events.

Laplanche proposed 'a reformulation of Freud's seduction theory as a truly general theory of the origins of the repressed unconscious, rather than a mere etiological hypothesis about neurotic symptoms'. The goal of the theory was to account 'for the "normal" development of the unconscious in human beings, while...it carries in its wake a theory of transference and of the psychoanalytic process in general'.

Laplanche highlights '"enigmatic signifiers"...transmitted via parental messages to the other' as a key element in the creation of the unconscious: in Laplanche's words, 'The enigma is in itself a seduction and its mechanisms are unconscious'. Thus 'Laplanche makes the link in Freud between the intrusive impact of the adult Other on the one hand, and the traumatic registration, representation or inscription of the Other's presence' on the other.

Ptolemy and Copernicus: The Unfinished Revolution

Following the introduction of the theory of generalized seduction, Laplanche published a collection of essays under the title "The Unfinished Copernican Revolution" which referred specifically to the "object" of psychoanalysis, the unconscious - the generalised seduction theory emphasising that such a revolution is "incomplete."

Freud, who repeatedly compared the psychoanalytic discovery to a Copernican revolution, was for Laplanche both "his own Copernicus but also his own Ptolemy." On the Copernican side, there is the conjoint discovery of the unconscious and the seduction theory, which maintains the sense of "otherness"; on the Ptolemaic side, there is (to Laplanche) the misdirection of the Freudian "return to a theory of self-centering". Thus 'what Laplanche calls Freud's "going astray", a disastrous shift from a Copernican to a Ptolemaic conception of the psyche...occurred when Freud replaced his early seduction theory...of sexuality as an "alien-ness" decentring the psyche' with one centred upon the individual - 'the illusion of a universe that Laplanche would characterize as Ptolemaic, where the ego feels it occupies the central position'.

Gender

The category of gender, says Jean Laplanche, is often "absent or unnoticed" in Freud. It is the child in the presence of adults, which raises the question of this difference which exists in adults. Gender assignment "is a complex process of acts which extends into the language and behavior of the child's significant others, its entourage". The child is "bombarded" by "prescriptive" messages which it has to translate and make sense of - 'messages of gender assignment, all those provided by the adults close to the child: parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. Their fantasies, their unconscious or preconscious expectations'. Thus for Jean Laplanche "Yes, gender precedes sex. But instead of organizing it, it is organized by the latter. " It is primarily the "sexual" element in the parents which "creates a fuss in gender-assignation," because the infantile sexuality of the adults is reactivated in the presence of the child.

Drive or object?

One key distinction between Laplanche's approach to psychoanalysis and most of those in the English-speaking world —Object relations theory

Object relations theory

Object relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory describes the process of developing a mind as one grows in relation to others in the environment....

, Ego psychology

Ego psychology

Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind.An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical construct called the ego to explain how that is done...

 and Kleinian thought

Melanie Klein

Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...

—is Laplanche's insistence on a distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). In contrast to the English-speaking schools, Laplanche—in some ways following Lacan—removes a biologically reductive basis from human sexuality.