← New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Psychoanalysis
Gila Ashtor, "Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche" (Routledge, 2021)
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Dr. Gail Astor
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Dr. Gail Astor
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Dr. Gail Astor
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome back to New Books and Psychoanalysis, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Our guest for the episode is Dr. Gail Aster. Dr. Aster is a critical theorist, psychoanalyst and writer. She teaches at Columbia University and is in private practice in New York City. She last joined the podcast to talk about her book Home Homo Psyche on Queer Theory and Erotophobia, published by Fordham University Press in 2021. She trained at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, IPTAR in New York City and is an editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality. The book we're discussing today is her new book, Exigent Psychoanalysis the Interventions of John Laplanche. Welcome back to the program.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Rosal. Thanks for having me.
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Podcast Host
Sure. I was, like I said, really excited that we could schedule this. As always with this interview, tell us your interest in Laplanche and also what motivated you to write this book.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, my interest in Laplanche started a very long time ago, but I found him too dense and too difficult to really understand, so I had to really come back to him only a lot of later. And I, I think that, you know, one of the Things that was so exciting to me originally about Laplanche that I could sense, but I really couldn't articulate until I went back and started reading. Everything of his was that he seems to offer a real alternative to the usual approaches, the usual models in psychoanalysis. And I think I have been especially, you know, a few years ago when I started reading him, so hungry for some alternatives. I was, you know, having been sort of growing up, as it were, in. In, you know, growing up on, I would say, like, you know, American, Anglo American psychoanalysis and the very entrenched debate between classical and relational sort of, that is what has shaped my psychoanalytic consciousness, very much so. And La Planche just seemed almost right away like an alternative that that was neither one nor the other, but something totally different. And that felt so, so refreshing, first of all, and so exciting because it felt like such a stale debate and one that I couldn't see a way to participate in in any way that was satisfying. And I wanted something really new. And La Planche seems to be doing something I didn't think a lot of other people were doing. I would say that was definitely how I think of the initial motivation and something I tried to get at, even in the way the book is structured. To me, there's certainly not how everyone would read Laplache, but to me it's one of the major things that's valuable for us as Anglo American readers is the intervention he offers to these debates that have so much, so much a part of our DNA, I think here in New York and in the States.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, well, when you talk about the density. Last semester at some point I was teaching, you know, Introduction to Drive Theory and it's a. It's a pretty much like they call it. I think there's like Freud 1 and Freud 2 and it's introduction to Drive Theory. And on the syllabus I was like, ah, do I include Laplanche, Drive and Instinct? One of my absolute favorite paper. Do I include it? Oh, is it too dense? And I agonized over it and I'm like, okay, well, I'll put it late. I'll put it late in the semester. And the word you just used, refreshing. It was the paper that lit the students up the most. It was they. And in fact, one of them said, this is the paper I've been waiting for. So it wasn't that. That really spoke to them. So it is refreshing. So talking about the structure of the book, let's just start at the top. And I'm sort of going to combine different things, you say, to get into it. What are the needs of the present moment and why is Laplanche suited to meet them? Let's start there. Or actually. And then what is Laplanche's third way?
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I trained at, you know, as you mentioned, IFTAR is pretty classical Freudian institute as far as institutes go. And yet we, you know, we read a lot about enactment and we read things that, you know, 20 years ago were seen as, you know, strictly relational terms and techniques and so on and so forth. And I was struck by the fact that, you know, and if you read deeply in relational work or you go to conferences, relational psychoanalysts, you know, they'll. They'll say, well, you know, maybe drive wasn't so bad. You know, maybe. Maybe Freud was kind of not terrible. You know, and so you feel this softening on both sides, and suddenly there is a little. There's. There's more integration. There genuinely is. Seems to be more of an appreciation that each side really does have something to offer and maybe we shouldn't throw everything out. So I think, I think that there's. When I think about the present moment, I think that what we need now in theory, and then I think the next question would be really about technique. How does this play out in the consulting room? But I think at the level of theory, I think we need something that appreciates the centrality of sexuality and drive, even if how we think of drive needs to be reformulated from Freud's original version. But we need some concept like it, and we also need to appreciate the reality, the concrete reality of attachment. So there needs to be some way that we can bring those two together and not. That's not identical to the existing. You know, it doesn't sit easily right now for Freudians or for relationalists, there are a few relationalists who are. Who are saying, you know, we really need to bring back drive, we need to bring back sexual. Where his sexuality gone. We've totally lost it in attachment theory. It's, It's. It's completely obscured. And you have. And you have Freudians who are. Who are saying they're equivalent, but for the most part, there's no framework that really can account for. For both of these points. And I think Laplanche, although he truly did not. He didn't lay it out this way. He didn't say this is a way to satisfy these different needs. I think that's what he's. I think that's what he's Offering, you know, I think there's so much. There's so much an appreciation in Laplanche of the actual other person and the actual other. And this. This is, I think, what the relationalists have been saying for a very long time. But he says it in a way that doesn't eliminate the drive and that doesn't eliminate sexuality, which seems very original to me, is something other people have not. We haven't managed to do, you know, otherwise.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. So, boy, boy, there's so much there. Let me tie two things together, what you said about, well, how we theorize and in the end. And also what we're doing clinically. Because at the beginning of the book, I think you're quoting Arnold Cooper saying, listen, it's not enough for us to dismiss other people. Cruz, most notably as a Freud basher. That's not enough to do that. And it's interesting. We had Cruise on the program. It's very interesting. But this is a quote that ties to what you're saying. If we are making claims as healers, charging for our services and claiming that we can enable people to alter their lives in a more positive direction, then we must sooner or later demonstrate that our ideas are in accord with findings from neighboring disciplines. And then from later in the book, Laplanche endeavors to show how different views of psychic structure manifest clinically in fierce debates about the goals of treatment. And I thought about that. The goals of treatment. And if we're charging for our services, because you have. At one point, Freud actually says, listen, if you want to make money doing this, you actually have to help people. And then, of course, much later on, he says, give up trying to cure, just learn and make money. Which is a quote that horrifies new students. But the. So for me, I really. I try to work deeply, pragmatically. I am here charging people for this. And I do find Laplanche helpful. But the idea of the otherness, which is you say at the beginning, you ask the question, have we lost sight of the true revolution, that we revolve around others? And then, and I was curious about this, you write, it's hardly coincidental that traditional metapsychology falters precisely at the place where a true recognition of others is required. How does it falter? What does that mean?
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Dr. Gail Astor
I mean, I think, you know, Laplanche, I think it's. This is sort of at the core of really his boldness. You know, look, La Planche goes back to this moment, which is in some sense already such an important moment in the development of psychoanalysis in the US he goes back to the seduction, the abandonment of the seduction theory. And, you know, for those who may not be as familiar, it's just worth repeating that, you know, for La Planche, when Freud, in his famous letter to Fleece, says, I've abandoned my neurotica, I've gotten it wrong, you know, his illness, hysteria, is not caused by actual trauma, it's caused by fantasy, and decides to leave sort of seduction behind and go into fantasy instead. For Laplanche, this is the moment when Freud goes astray. But what's very interesting about Laplanche choosing this moment, although he doesn't really acknowledge it, I think, is that this is the same moment that American psychoanalysts, and not just psychoanalysts, but trauma researchers also chose as the sort of the moment when Freud abandons trauma and the most important developments of metapsychology. And. But they, but these trauma theorists and the relations tell a very different story. They use this exact same moment, but they each tell very different stories about what it means. And so they both agree that Freud abandons seduction, and they both agree that he, you know, that something really goes astray. But whereas I think conventional and mainstream psychoanalysis assumes that what Freud does wrong is he goes into the world of fantasy and leaves real people behind and real trauma. Laplanche says, well, not so fast. It's really not about trauma versus fantasy. That's a little bit simplistic. That has led us nowhere. We followed this thread and where have we landed? In fact, what Freud really abandons is the fact that people are impacted by actual other people. It's mediated by fantasy, but there are other people there. It's not just fantasy. He's trying to have both La Planche, I think at all times, he's trying to have fantasy plus real trauma and real otherness. And I think this is something that is really missing from the original sort of very famous 1980s sort of critique of Freud and has been, you could say, absent in a lot of this trauma theory, since it's, you know. So I think for La Planche, where it falters, metapsychology is it can't. The way that we have it now, we can't really imagine a role for actual other people, or that when we do, it can only be by eliminating all the fantasy, so that things are now suddenly very, very concrete, very literal, very far from. From a complex psychology. I think that's what, what I think of when I. When I say that if that makes sense, that does.
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Podcast Host
It does make Sense. And, and so in. In the debates, maybe the 80s, or AS. AS you entered and you mentioned it in different places throughout the book. But how does our current discourse. How do we end up leaving the underlying theory intact? How do we sort of just do window dressing and not touch that? La Planche does. What are we doing in our discourse or not doing?
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Arnold Cooper, I think, wrote really the great essay on this that I quote from at the beginning. You know, he says we just. We won't. He says we cannot bring ourselves to use. This is, I think, essentially almost verbatim how. He says it's something to the effect of we cannot bring ourselves to use it. A language other than the one Freud taught us. We just. We keep. We insist on the same words. Why do we have to keep using the word the same words? Why not say, if the Oedipus complex no longer fits, or if we can't find a way to. To make it coherent within a current, why not just throw it out? Just say it doesn't work. It's like a term like, you know, doctors, medical doctors don't use the same words for certain diseases. If they've discovered a new finding, they say, well, that's what we used to call it, but obviously we can't call it that anymore. Our underlying science is totally. Do we understand biology is totally different. How can we call it the same thing? And Cooper is saying, well, why. Why are we insisting on. On maintaining all of the same language no matter what? This is something I found, I found very frustrating in my training as a candidate. It felt like there were moments when I thought I literally could be in the 1920s, I could be in the 1950s. I don't even know what year I'm in because all of the terms for everything we're doing is the same as it's always been. It's just we're supposed to somehow know or believe that when we use them in 2022 or 2023, we mean something different. And it's like, well, that's a lot of legwork, mentally. That's a lot to ask people to do. And I think Cooper is saying. Then he said this in the 80s, so, you know. But I agree with him, Cooper saying, it doesn't. It doesn't work. We're not pulling it off. If you use the same words, then, believe it or not, you are also using the same meanings because there's no way to totally get rid of the parts of these theories that don't fit. Anymore or that are wrong. And I think, you know, Cooper says that for Cooper, we're too attached to Freud, and we have this idealization of him, and this is why, according to him, we can't. We can't change the language. I think other people would say it's just, what. Okay, well, that's nice, but what new language should we. Should we be using? But I think Laplace is. I mean, he. He titles one of his books quite, quite literally, you know, new Foundations for Psychoanalysis. I think he. He means, like, let's. Let's try to develop some new language, some new foundations. Let's really have the. The courage to retire things that don't make sense anymore, that don't work anymore, whatever we can agree those are. You know, and I. I think that would. I think that would go a long way towards invigorating our discourse a little. But I. But I find that it's obviously very hard to do.
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Podcast Host
Very hard to do. But you have a wonderful sentence that. It's one of the sentences that I read. I went, oh, yeah, that's true. The grammar of our discourse is filled with constructions we do not believe anymore. I just love that. But I'm like, okay, well, yeah, well, now what? But you also talk about the fact that there's this incredible trepidation to go, what am I allowed to question? And if I question the wrong thing, you know, is this Jenga? Am I going to topple the whole thing? And then what? This incredible anxiety around it. Yeah, yeah, that happens.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Such a remarkable. Yeah, I think that's right. Such a. It's such a remarkable thing. You know, I. I experienced this, obviously very acutely as a candidate in training when, you know, you're. Every candidate is anxious, but also, you really aren't sure what you're allowed to question about Freud and what you're not allowed to question. But what struck me was, you know, this past year, I was teaching at iftar, the Freud class. Freud won. And like, you were describing, and, you know, we were doing the early Freud, and I was struck by how difficult it was to encourage my students, these candidates, to question anything. Like, they were so anxious. And I was like, where is your disagreement? It's okay to disbelieve. It's okay to disagree. And they were just, like, silent. And I thought, oh, my God, like, what? How is this getting conveyed? And, you know, in some sense, it's no mystery. I mean, the history of psychoanalysis is filled with, as everyone sort of knows, these stories of, you know, exiled psychoanalysts and people who got punished for disagreeing. And in fact, the only people you could say who managed to sort of change things from within are those that said that they weren't changing things in a big way. They just. They said one thing and they did another. You know, you think about. Kohut was so good at this. I mean, he got in trouble anyway, but he was very good at saying, no, no, I'm the ultimate Freudian. I'm the ultimate. Just don't worry. You know, I'm like, I'm. I'm really not. I'm really not going to do that much differently. It's a reassurance, you know, And Laplanche also, I think, you know, some people have. Have said to me often that they find him quite anxious, and I don't particularly feel that much anxiety with him. Yeah. But I've heard people say that he's anxious in. What they mean is that he is always seeking to reassure the reader that, you know, that, like, it's okay to sort of disagree or that we can. We're allowed to. He's doing a faithful reading of Freud and that we can. We can throw out the things that. That don't work, but still keep the things that do and that this might betray some anxiety. I don't. Yeah, I. I personally don't feel that as much, but. But there is a certain way in which it. It feels like. I don't know if we're collectively traumatized by this history of the development of our discipline or if it's what I think we are. Yeah. Is that what I think we are?
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Podcast Host
Because it's in the zeitgeist, not only for practitioners, certainly in New York, but patients. It's just in the air. Patients will say out of, you know, where, you know, I know you never want me to call you in between sessions. I know I'm not supposed to look at you. I know they know all the prohibitions. None of which I've said.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Right, right.
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Podcast Host
None of which are true, you know, but they know the pro. They just know it.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Right.
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Podcast Host
And so I do think. I think we do have. We are traumatized.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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Dr. Gail Astor
It feels very hard to really. And I think, you know, Freud, you know, there's been, in the history of psychoanalysis and even in the recent history, the pattern of developing our field has been one in which, you know, we say, well, if you don't believe in an unconscious, then you're not a psychoanalyst. And then fill in the blank. If you don't believe in X, you're not, you know, if you don't believe in Y, you're not in a psychoanalytic. So there's this constant use of these sort of secret passwords that indicate that you're a true psychoanalyst or not. And, you know, maybe it's anxiety about we ourselves don't know what a psychoanalyst is and isn't. And certainly Freud was very anxious about what distinguished, you know, psychoanalysis from everything else that he was doing and that was going on at the time. But it's a way in which we. I think Cooper, you know, mentions this frustration and really names it. And I think what's more staggering to me is that it's still utterly intact like that. It does not seem to have abated. I mean, I'm talking about teaching a class in the fall, you know, like students that have been in grad school that. Where it's a very different culture in debating. And you can say, this philosopher is an idiot, that one doesn't know what he's talking about, this one's a misogynist. And yet when it comes to psychoanalysis, it's like, well, you know, I don't know. Maybe I. Maybe I. Maybe I'm wrong. It's, you know, it must be. It must be untouchable. We can't throw out these basic tenets. I don't know. I mean, have you encountered that in your teaching? Yeah, with another teaching.
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Podcast Host
And the best way I ever read it was we argue over furniture and frequency.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Right, right.
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Podcast Host
The furniture. I love that one. Yeah, but. Yeah, but what's so interesting in this is that the entire focus on whether or not we are analysts or being analytical or. I think you write in the book that, you know, when painters study classical painting, right. They don't go try to replicate it. They're like, oh, that's interesting. But they use it to do something in 2022. Yeah, but in the focus on. Am I being analytic? Am I being. Am I in the guild?
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
Do I pass? If someone watched this, if Freud was here, if Andre Green, whoever is here. And I actually said this in my class is. Students will present their final case. And look, they have to. They present the case, they have some idea of what's going on, and they talk about it, and it's really wonderful. And if you want to stump them, you say, great. How's the patient doing?
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Dr. Gail Astor
Huh? Interesting.
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Podcast Host
There's no, oh, oh, you know, so we lose sight of the. And that's why I loved that if we're making claims as healers. What are we doing? What do we. And, and, you know, because I, I think a lot of people, I include myself, when I started with my analyst, I didn't know I was starting with an analyst. I had a referral for a therapist.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Right.
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Podcast Host
I didn't know.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Dr. Gail Astor
It's very interesting. And I think, I think, and I think it is hard. I mean, obviously, as, as those of us who practice also know, you know, I think intellectually it can be easier to sort of debate these things or to feel more irreverent. But certainly you, you know, when you're practicing there is, I think often, I certainly feel this in my practice, where you do want to make sure that you're being analytic, whatever analytic means to you or you, you. There is some anxiety, I think professional, you know, anxiety about like, am I, am I responding analytically as opposed to just, you know, personally or something. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's such a sort of bizarre thing we're doing here as analysts, really. And so I can under, you know, I understand why we need to grasp onto some sense of certainty, but I think that it has just become also just such a defense really, as a field. Yeah.
- [26:42]
Podcast Host
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- [27:07]
Commercial Narrator
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Podcast Host
Yeah, and practicing. I sometimes, you know, depending on the, the patient, I'm like, I am lashing myself to the mast, right? Because this is, these are the sirens. And if I don't function analytically, this is going to be bad for everybody.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
But I'm also reminded, can I do this without quoting Freud? No, I can't. Freud says don't, don't, don't confuse the scaffolding for the building.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, yeah.
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Podcast Host
But we need the scaffolding.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah.
- [27:59]
Podcast Host
All right. Well, then let's jump into otherness and enlarged sexuality. Since this is so key to the book. And I'm going to. I put together a lot of different things to get into it, and part of it, actually, from your interview last time. So enlarged sexuality to insist the psyche is sexual at its fundamental core. The way it's constructed is sexual sexuality as it pertains to consciousness. Sexuality as intrusive, intersubjective, exogenous. Language doesn't give us sexuality. It's language spoken by another person who has sexuality. The child works on material that is already sexual. So those. Just a lot of different ways that you talk about it in the book, I think we talked about, you know. Well, let me form a question out of this. How does enlarged sexuality demand quoting you a little bit? A totalizing reversal in how we understand the basic navigation of mental life?
- [29:12]
Dr. Gail Astor
I mean, I think one of the ways I might put it, trying to be straightforward is that I think what Laplanche is talking about is that we have a real tendency, and this is built into language. So it's not. It's not something that, you know, any one of us does versus other people. This is how perception is organized vis a vis language and civilization. But that we have a tendency to really assume that desire originates with us and that we. That we are agents of our own needs and desires. And. And it originates with us and we go out in the world and we act on it. And Laplace is saying, I know that feels like really obvious to everyone, but actually it's totally the opposite. First, the baby is innocent. The baby does not have sexual desire in the Freudian sense. The baby is not born that way. Baby is totally helpless. The parent, the adult, whoever it is that is taking care of the baby is the one who has a sexuality. And this. This sexuality becomes a problem for the baby because it's. It's a lot to have to work on and figure out what to do with. There's a lot of stuff coming at. Coming at the baby that the baby is not prepared to handle. And this. This encounter between the baby who is actually innocent sexually and the adult who is not, ends up forming for the baby a kind of sexual unconscious ends up forming kind of sexuality, after which point the baby will become a child, will become an adult who has desires and has needs that have. Are never purely its own. And they're never purely its own because they originated with the other person. They are the effect of the baby's encounter with the adult. And so I think one of the ways La Planche really wants us to think about enlarged sexuality is. Is really something that we feel most. We feel very certain is our deepest desire. Feel very certain is the most private thing about us. But actually, it's really not. It's the total opposite. It's the thing that comes at us from the other person first. So, yeah, I hope that clarifies. I think that's one way to think about it.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, no, it does. And coming from the other person in the way that, like, can. Can work out sometimes. I was reading the columnist Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times this past Sunday, and she's talking about being queer in Alabama. And. But she said, I was reading. Rereading your book and reading this, and she says, I get it. When people who are alien tell you that deep down they are just like you, it saves you from having to confront how you might actually be like them, how you might envy their freedom, the strength of their communities. As any decent psychoanalyst will tell you, the flip side of fear is desire. And her whole article is about otherness. So it's in the Zeitgeist. And what you say in the book, which I love, is that the baby gets more than they bargain for. They come for affect regulation, which we'll get into. But when I read Laplanche, Enlarged Sexuality, seduction, translation of this material, which the baby starts working on, what are the differences between that and Ferenzi's confusion of tongues? It's what it reminded me of, but I think they're different, but I couldn't figure out how.
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Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, that's a good. You know, Laplanche has a lot of admiration for Firenzie. He says that, you know, Firenze is the first to really use that. To dare to use the phrase between adults and children, between adults and the child. That between, for Laplanche, is very important. Firenze acknowledges that there is an encounter between them. I don't know if it's. That there's. That there's. What you mean is that isn't what Laplanche is saying, just a variation, similar to Forensic's notion of the sort of child's language of tenderness and the adult's language of passion. Like, isn't this.
- [34:17]
Podcast Host
That's what it felt like to me at first reading. I haven't done. I haven't gone closer. It felt like. Yeah, a variation of that.
- [34:24]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, I think. I think that's true. I think it is. I think it is a variation of that. To some extent, I think we. They are in some sense speaking different languages. I think the difference is that for forensic, the result of that is, you know, it's. It's almost. It's. Well, it's. It's. Takes a lot of work to make sure that that's not. That doesn't lead to something abusive and exploitative for the child because of these different languages. But I think that. I think that Laplanche is saying something. He's a little. Going into a little more depth about it and saying, yeah, that instinct is right. They are speaking in some sense two languages. But in another sense they have. It's not. How do I put this? It's not straightforward, like all the. How do I want to explain this? It's not so straightforward that the adult is just bringing passion that will somehow corrupt the innocence of the child. It's not. It's not really a corruption. Only for Laplanche, this is a really good thing as well. Like the fact that the innocent infant encounters the sexual adult is the reason that the infant grows into an adult with an unconscious. So it's very productive, this encounter. It can be pathological, it can be traumatic, but that's. That should be, hopefully, the exception that should be in certain circumstances. But for Laplanche, you need this encounter and this differential in it to form the sort of mechanisms of. Of one's mental life. And so it's not. It's not really just a tragic thing. It's also, you know, a prerequisite for emotional and psychological development. Whereas I think there's a certain pathos to forensics that leans, which I think is very evocative, and I think. I think we kind of feel, quite intuitively, I think many of us, like, that makes a lot of sense, and I think it does. But. But he's also telling a sort of a very particular story about how that encounter goes. And Laplanche is saying much more generally, like, no, this. This is. This is good. This is what's going to give the child an unconscious, because the child is going to encounter this thing it has no idea what to do with. And in. In needing to figure out what to do with it, but not knowing how it's going to start building tools by itself to figure out how to make sense of all this stuff, all this noise that is coming at it from the adult. And so it's going to be really successful. The child, in many ways, the baby, then the child is going to translate a lot of this material and a lot of it will go into structuring and unconscious and to structuring consciousness, into symbolization and to fantasy. And, like, that's all wonderful, but it's never going to translate everything. And there are always going to be things that are incoherent to the adult and therefore really incoherent to the child or something that just because of the fit of the adult and the child, it doesn't even have to be because there's something so deeply wrong with the adult. It could just be. It's a certain match that is conducive to this. But there will be things that are. That the infant simply can't figure out what to do with. They can't make sense of. And that's what becomes the origin of this. Of this more complicated sexuality for La Planche. And so I think in that one of the ways we might think about the differences is I think La Planche maybe could be said to be generalizing those ideas a little bit more and taking them out of the context of something that is necessarily problematic for the infant.
- [39:05]
Podcast Host
Right, so then that. I think you've answered a question which is. Laplanche says that sexuality develops in relation to self preservation. So that that would, in a sense, answer that this is developmental. The child has to go to work, and that is self preservative. There's also. I love this because I think about it from the analyst point of view, pretending that the adult who provides attachment can turn off his own unconscious. Yeah, yeah, we can't.
- [39:37]
Dr. Gail Astor
Right. Oops, sorry.
- [39:39]
Podcast Host
Oops, sorry about that. You know.
- [39:42]
Dr. Gail Astor
Right.
- [39:43]
Podcast Host
Two people in there. And then I think that what you did, you used the word noise is a wonderful passage in the Book of Noise has only ever been noise. And so then you write, it's no longer possible to speak in terms of what the adult did or didn't do, because no amount of remembering could ever include the elements of communication which were unconscious and all the more powerful for being so. And I think that's what you were just saying about that. Which will always be untranslatable.
- [40:19]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's where La Planche can be understood to be offering an alternative to some of the more contemporary developments in psychoanalytic theory which have swapped. And this is what I mean about the sort of interpretation of trauma which swapped sort of fantasy for reality. Like, no, no, that we need to really focus on what. On what actually happened. And Laplanche is saying, sweetie, even if you did that, you would not get to this, because this is not something you remember. This is not something, you know, this is just. This is sort of what your unconscious is made out of. This is the thing that is. Is part of it that you can't get at.
- [41:10]
Podcast Host
So I'm glad you said that because in thinking about. Yes, I have put a lot of thoughts here. What is meant by this sentence interpretation is on the side of repression rather than of the repressed.
- [41:28]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea there is that in some sense the act of interpreting, the act of interpreting material, psychic content is a way of binding it and making. Turning it into something that has language and that can be understood in language and that takes it out of the realm of the sort of non verbal unconscious. In the same way, it's something that helps us gain traction, helps us gain autonomy, helps us feel like we have understood things better. And so in that sense, a. It's a good thing. And it's also a thing which is also a function which keeps things more or, you know, is conducive to a kind of. A kind of repression in that way, because it's not getting acted on, it's getting turned into language in a certain sense. Yeah.
- [42:52]
Podcast Host
I want to move on to the central claims of affect, but something that, again, one of those things that I had never considered one way or the other, but this I thought was wonderful. The breast is not only an organ for feeding children, but a sexual organ. Something utterly overlooked by Freud and has been since Freud. I mean, that was mind blowing to me.
- [43:23]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing. I agree. And I think you can hear in that sentence of Laplanche is that he is also sort of shocked, like, how has this been overlooked by Freud and everyone since Freud, like, what. How do we think this is actually working? We've sort of completely taken this scene of feeding out of its interpersonal and affective context and really failed to consider what this actually might involve for everyone. So I think you can kind of hear to me in that sentence, you can hear La Planche also being incredulous. Like, what. How is this overlooked? This is so obvious right in front of us.
- [44:18]
Podcast Host
It is so obvious once you. And yet I had never thought about it. But what's so interesting is I had begun to. You know, all of our institutes have our own literature and things. And I had begun about two years ago going, there is no sexuality. I went to a school, the modern psychoanalytic school. Right. So. And I'm like, I was. I thought, oh, I'm going to write a paper called no Sex Please. We're moderns.
- [44:39]
Dr. Gail Astor
Right, right.
- [44:40]
Podcast Host
But then I, Daniel Nafo, was the podcast saying, no, sexuality has dropped out of the discourse.
- [44:47]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, everywhere.
- [44:48]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
- [44:50]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, for some people, you know, attachment is the, is the reason attachment theory is the bad guy. It's attachment theory that is displaced sexuality. And all this focus on attachment and on the dyad and on seeing the mother and the adult is a sort of someone who provides attachment has really made it impossible to think these two things together. And so, yeah, I think that's, That's a big. It's a big topic. It's sort of a big question, I think, in our field today. Where's sexuality gone?
- [45:28]
Podcast Host
So let's talk about attachment. And my question was, well, I'll read a little bit. Harmonious scenes are a result of. Of healthy parental functioning and the disharmony is a result of parental psychopathology or failure. That was in quotes. Although contemporary clinicians clearly attempt to avoid blaming the parent, the implication that environmental failure is the source of pathology is unavoidable. Are we implicating parents again?
- [46:00]
Dr. Gail Astor
I mean, I think that the way that we are not. I think the way we're not doing that is by understanding, and this is very, very important to Laplanche, that what the adult is transmitting, the thing we're talking about here is the adult's unconscious. This is what. This is not conscious to the adult. So unless you were comfortable blaming adults, parents for their unconscious, which, like, I don't. I mean, I guess, but that doesn't. That seems like blaming them for breathing. I mean, in some sense, right. What Laplanche is saying is they simply can't do a thing without their own unconscious being part of it, and no one can. And so they are going to convey in every way that they relate to their children. Feeding them, scolding them, praising them, hugging them, making them dinner, giving them baths, whatever caretaking is involved, they're going to be conveying messages from their unconscious. And the, the mostly what. The stuff that we're interested in are those messages that are totally unconscious to the, to the adult. They're not things the adult knows.
- [47:23]
Podcast Host
Right. It's a message that nobody knows.
- [47:25]
Dr. Gail Astor
Exactly. It's a message nobody knows. And so I, I think this is really like very, very important to Lapanche. And I think this is also talk about refreshing, like a way out of some of this more pathologizing discourse that is, you know, my mother did X, you know, she did Y, and she, you know, she said this, she said that and, well, that could all be true, but it's really not even about the mother that. That we know. It's about the mother who doesn't. It's the parts of the mother that. That she doesn't even know that are. That are. And you know, that are unconscious to her. So of course they're going to be even more of a problem for the child. And I say of course, because this is where affect comes in. They're going to be more of a problem because by virtue of them being unconscious, the adult has not. Has not symbolized them at all, has not worked on them, has not produced any. Any. Any representation around them that makes them all the more powerful to the infant and to the child. The things that the parents are saying to you, those are things that are. Have already sort of passed through some level of verbal representation. So that's already quite mediated. That's not the stuff that Lapanche is. Is talking about. He's talking about the stuff that the parents that is not passed through that level of mediation and therefore is sort of like, you know, this, like, burning fire within them that they have no idea is there, that is very raw and not mediated by. By language. That's the stuff that is very powerful to the infant and to the child, and that becomes a problem. So I think, I would hope that sort of a nuanced appreciation of where this is coming from, the adult would take us away from pathologizing the parents. You know, it seems like.
- [49:34]
Podcast Host
Well, it does, because you have. You have a wonderful sentence which is like. It takes it to the logical absurdity. You say, listen, in this case, the only good adult is a psychologically neutral one, which course is impossible. But Laplanche says, listen, what I really love is this unmediated fire. It activates the child's creativity and their drive to translate. So that's where it becomes necessary. What is the central claim of affect? You write a lot about affect and about attachment theory and regulation of affecting.
- [50:13]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, I think, you know, an affect has its own separate, sort of very vexed status in psychoanalysis for a lot of people. It's one of the biggest problems in psychoanalysis is that it's missing a coherent theory of affect, which I think it is. But, you know, affect, first of all, it's become obviously such a huge, huge topic in many fields, both in the humanities and maybe more sort of publicly in neurobiology and neuroscience and I think, and in psychoanalysis, those that are working on affect regulation take affect very seriously. But I think that if you look at that. Some of that stuff on affect, regulation especially, you begin to appreciate the role that affect plays in the development of psychic life, and that the need to regulate affect is sort of the primary preeminent goal of the infant and the adult. And nothing else can happen if that's not happening. This is sort of fundamental to everything else. And the entire development of the brain depends upon how this goes. So this is as important as it gets. And Laplanche says nothing about affect. And affect was like a dirty word in France in those days. And they had a lot of fights with Lacan about affect. And it was a big problem in the 70s in France. So we could speculate as to why maybe Laplace does not talk about affect. But as far as I understand it, affect is sort of the missing piece of the puzzle. To understand that, we need to understand what Laplanche is saying, because I don't. It's, for me, a way of making sense of what actually is getting communicated between the adult and the child. When we talk about these messages and Laplace goes back and forth, his message is the best word. He's not really sure. It sounds a little Lacanian, but he uses it anyway. And then he used some other words, but what. But even. Let's stick with messages. But what do we mean by messages? And I think it's not always clear. And part of his anxiety about messages, which I agree with, is that we don't want to sound too verbal. We don't want to sound like it's something that the adult is saying because it's the opposite. We're talking about precisely those things the adult is unaware of. And I think affect helps us with that because affect gives us a way of understanding that this is what we're talking about that's so important are precisely those communications from the adult that are sort of happening all the time, but that are not mediated by language necessarily. And so I think affect, considering that there is, you know, affect is. Is sort of how we relate and fundamentals that gives us so maybe a sort of a way of imagining what's going on here between these two people and that the need to regulate affect is. Is what brings the infant and the. And the adult so close together that, you know, the infant needs food and shelter. We know all of that. But what we've also learned in the past 20 years, really, is that the infant, to survive and thrive, mentally and biologically, also needs to regulate its affect. This is what the adult. So much of what the adult does is that. And so we need to. To me, this is like the. One of the biggest things we need to integrate into, like, a model of psychoanalysis, like what the implications of that are for our theories.
- [54:28]
Podcast Host
Well, you ask this, you ask this question in the book you write. What would it mean to accept a comprehensive affect theory as a viable replacement for Freud's Dual instinct theory is the primary factor in psychological organization. Psychological organization. So is that. Big question your next book?
- [54:48]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think so. I think that's what I'm sort of working on now about affect theory. And I've already gotten in some very heated arguments with some Freudians and. Oh, but maybe I don't think they would call themselves Freudians or they would just call themselves contemporary psychoanalysts. I'm not really sure, you know, but who are. Who are really insistent that, no, we already have an affect theory because we believe in repression. And I think, well, that's not going nearly. I mean, it's nearly far enough. And, you know, this field of affect has just. Just grown so much in 20 years. And we have. There are some very interesting ideas out there about. About how we're organized affectively that I would like to put into conversation with some of these concepts. So, yeah, that's. That is what I'm working on next.
- [55:50]
Podcast Host
Good.
- [55:50]
Dr. Gail Astor
You're right. Yeah.
- [55:51]
Podcast Host
I was thinking, you know, Laflanche, he doesn't talk about affect, but in terms of what the child needs in drive and instinct, where he does say, hey, wait a minute, the baby cannot regulate its own temperature.
- [56:04]
Dr. Gail Astor
Needs.
- [56:05]
Podcast Host
That's you. It's not. It's not an instinct. You can't do it without the other. So he didn't call that affect, but what is needed.
- [56:14]
Dr. Gail Astor
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [56:18]
Podcast Host
Well, I have seven more hours of questions, but we're at the end of hours. Anything else for the people listening that you would like them to know about the book?
- [56:28]
Dr. Gail Astor
I hope that it. You know, I hope people feel encouraged to read some of the Laplanche. And I think mostly, you know, we haven't had an opportunity to address it, but I know when I have spoken at conferences, this is something that always comes up. And I hope that people feel when they pick up something on Laplanche or reading something on the planche, they feel, you know, emboldened to sort of play with it too clinically and technically and see what this. What the implications are of these ideas. You know, I think Laplanche uses the phrase so many times putting to work. You know, put Freud to work. And I, I really, I think that is a good, has a good ethos. I think that's something that like gets us out of some of these. More what the defenses you and I were talking about at the beginning. I think putting Laplanche to work, I think putting psychoanalysis to work, I think, you know, we shouldn't be so worried about, about breaking anything. You know, like, let's, let's see what happens when we, when we use these ideas and we apply these ideas. Like what, what works, what doesn't? Like what if there's so much Laplanche has not thought about, has not written about, is not included. Like there's so, so where, you know, so many places to go and I, I just, I hope people feel like they can do that. It was one of, I think more the meta goals of the work. Yeah.
- [57:56]
Podcast Host
Good. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. It was really great to go through just a small part of the book, really. It's a terrific book. We've been talking with Dr. Gail Astor, her latest book, Exigent Psychoanalysis the Interventions of John LaPanche. Dr. Astor, thanks so much for joining today.
- [58:14]
Dr. Gail Astor
Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [58:29]
Podcast Host
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