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New Books in Psychoanalysis
Jonathan House, “Laplanche: An Introduction” (The Unconscious in Translation, 2015)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
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- [01:07]
Philip Lance
Welcome to New Books in Psychoanalysis. This is Philip Lance, your host for today's podcast. Today I'm interviewing Jonathan House. And this is a little bit different kind of an interview, because Jonathan's not exactly the author of this book that we're looking at today. The book is la An Introduction, although he has a lot to do with the book as well. He'll tell you, but a translator, a publisher, an editor. But the book has an introduction by Dominic Scarfone and then some kind of seminal articles by Laplanche and Pontali. So we'll tell you more about what this book is all about in a moment. But meanwhile, Jonathan teaches courses on Freud and Laplanche in the psychoanalytic Studies program of Columbia University's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. And at Columbia, he is also on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and also, I guess at Columbia, he's on the. On this. He's a training and supervising analyst of the center for Psychoanalytic Training. So welcome to the program, Jonathan.
- [02:19]
Jonathan House
Thanks so much, Philip.
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Philip Lance
And yeah, so why don't you tell us about these different hats you wear and kind of like what you do for a living. Exactly.
- [02:29]
Jonathan House
Well, I have a long history. I'll skip over the first part. I used to be an internist, then I took a year off, which turned into A decade to work for the labor movement and then decided to go back and do another residency in psychiatry with the notion of becoming an analyst. But the psychiatry. I figured if the psychoanalysis didn't work out, I could always sell drugs. But it turns out I rather like psychiatry, but I like psychoanalysis more. So I did go on with psychoanalytic training at Columbia's Institute center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. And I've been very lucky and then to bring it all the way up to date, for reasons we may get into. I got involved in translating La Planche and got to know him and eventually was appointed by him to the council that runs the Fondation La Planche, who was funded by Laplanche in his lifetime and again in his will. And the goal of the foundation is to see that his work is translated and better known throughout the world. In effect, I am responsible for the translations into English of his work, which is about half done, maybe a little more, a little less, about half. So when I skipped what I do for a living, you know, at the moment, yeah, I earned my bread by the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. And that's my full time job, which I also adore.
- [04:35]
Philip Lance
Yeah, I saw your online. You charge really nice high rates. I'm gonna be able to charge and collect those rates someday. Maybe because you have high overhead right there on what's Fifth Avenue? Or like you're across the street from the Metropolitan.
- [04:51]
Jonathan House
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's. I'm on Fifth Avenue right in the middle of all the museums. I don't know that that's what allows me to charge the rates. No matter what I put online. It's always a negotiation. There's a story I sometimes tell about that. When I was. I've done a lot of different teaching at the medical school, the Residency and Analytic Institute, down at the regular university. But one thing I did for a little while was each new medical student has in their first year, four sessions, I guess it is, or encounters with a psychiatrist. And there was this working class young woman who I was seeing for these four hour encounters. And I told her I was not only a psychiatrist, but a psychoanalyst. And she said, well, what's that exactly? With a certain raising of the eyebrow that indicated to me that she already had an idea or of what it was. And what I said to her is, well, it's sort of like being a Rolls Royce mechanic.
- [06:10]
Philip Lance
Yeah.
- [06:13]
Jonathan House
Yeah, it's true that my analytic work, psychotherapy work is what supports my teaching. And, you know, none of which gets paid and the supervision and all of that is not. And now the writing and the translating and the publishing enterprise itself.
- [06:38]
Philip Lance
Yeah, okay, well, we'll get back to that. And I get that question a lot, too. When people say, well, aren't you. If I, you know, I say, I'm in training to be a psychoanalyst. Well, but aren't you already a PhD in clinical psychology and a psychotherapist? And I say, yes, but I like to say that it's kind of the gold standard of. Of psychotherapy, although I'm sure some people would take issue with that. And it's not. That's what we like to think it is, but there's some controversy out there. But let's get back to make sure our listeners know about this book we're going to talk about today. So can you tell us the different. Tell us about this book and like, the breakdown of different parts of it and who's involved in putting it together, including who is Laplacian? Who is. You know that too.
- [07:25]
Jonathan House
All right, well, a couple of questions. I'll go back to the who is Laplanche? Which is an easier one than what psychoanalysis that you were asking that question always reminds me of when people ask me, are you a Freudian? And I never know what to answer to that. So I generally say, yes. And then we take it from there. I'm a believer in the conflict theory of the advance of knowledge. So the book was the third book, I think, that the Unconscious in Translation published, and the foundation thought that this should be an early one, because the central text of the book is a text by Dominique Scarfone, which was initially published in a series of books that came out in France called Psychoanalysts of Today. And each one was devoted to one analyst. And there would be a essay about his work and then selections, excerpts here and there. The essays tended to be pretty good. I thought the notion of having little excerpts, you know, was a bizarre way to present anyone's work. But at any rate, Dominique wrote this wonderful essay. It was back at least 15 years or more ago, so maybe 20 years. So Laplanche was still alive and developing his work, though it doesn't quite cover the full range of Laplanche's work, but it's a lovely essay.
- [09:20]
Philip Lance
And he wrote that in French. Did he himself translate it into English or so on.
- [09:28]
Jonathan House
The person who translated is someone he's worked with and I've worked with is Dorothea Bonnegau Katz, a French woman, an analyst who lives and works in London. And she's terrific. She's translated a bunch of Dominique's stuff. And so she did that translation plus the third part of the book, which is an article La Planche wrote as an introduction to beyond the Pleasure Principle. And then that's perhaps one of the last pieces he ever wrote. And then one of the first pieces he ever wrote, which I guess we'll get into, is one that I translated. So my notion was we were going to do Dominique's piece as the center, and then to take a very early piece by Laplanche, actually by Laplanche and Pontalyse, and then take the latest work that he'd done. And so that's.
- [10:39]
Philip Lance
Okay. So let's see. So you called it. The central part of the book was Dominique's essay, which is kind of an intro. It's a broad overview, introductory introduction to Laplange. And I had a question about that, but I can't remember what that was. But. Okay, so let's move away from the book for a moment and we'll get back to it, because I think it's very interesting, this. Would you call it a little publishing enterprise called the Unconscious in Translation. And that makes you kind of the general editor, publisher, say a little more about what that project is about.
- [11:24]
Jonathan House
Okay. And I realize I've skipped over your question of who's La Planche and why is it important? Come back to that. But actually, the two go together because I started the publishing house because so little, almost none of Laplanche's work had been translated into English. There was, of course, you know, the. The book that everyone has, you know, the language of psychoanalysis that he wrote, and that came out in seven, I guess, in French and in 70 in English. And, you know, that's, you know, sort of every language and country analysts and scholars in all sorts of areas use that. And. But other than that, and his major text from 1970, which it was La Planche alone, it was largely unknown, couple of exceptions, but largely untranslated. So my notion at first was, let's get Laplanche translated. And then a little bit more grandiose. The notion is, first Laplanche and maybe later others, that works by psychoanalysts and by those in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, that should be in English and should be available to us Anglophones that have not been translated. I wanted to try and translate and publish. Obviously not me doing all the translating, but that's why I set up the Unconscious in Translation. In other words, the notion was that there's a lot of stuff that is going to get translated. Andre Green is going to get translated, Lacan is going to be fully translated, and in fact various translations. So this is the notion of translating what wouldn't otherwise be translated into English.
- [13:34]
Philip Lance
And so what qualifies you? I'm asking this kind of funny, because what qualifies you to translate from French into English? How did you learn in French, in other words?
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Jonathan House
Oh, well, it's an awfully good question. The straightforward answer is nothing. Here's how it started. I was in my first year of candidacy. We had a very rigorous course with Freud and reading most of the standard edition, at least it was assigned. Although like everyone else who sort of get to it a bit later, reading it for the second, I. E. First time sometime. But at any rate, I was quite disappointed that I was still really befuddled by a lot of Freud. And one of the central things I was having a hard time with that it seemed to me Freud had a hard time with, was the question of sexuality in many directions. It was easy to pick out parts to admire and yet easier to pick out parts to criticize, but didn't feel like I could get my arms around it. And then someone tipped me off to the article that initially came out in English. It was written in French. It was an article in French published in 1964 by La Planche Pointalice, which was really. It's as if the language of psychoanalysis. That book is almost the research for this paper that was okay, and this.
- [15:14]
Philip Lance
Paper is the one that's in the book we're talking about today. Just to keep that in mind, although.
- [15:20]
Jonathan House
Its first title was in English was Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality, which is quite a fair title for it. The title in French is different and more fun. It's Primal Fantasies, Fantasies of Origins, Origins of Fantasy, Even more fun in French. Anyway, I just read the English version, thought it was great, but I was still sort of confused and figured I ought to read the French version. And I tried to read the French version and it was really too hard for me. My French wasn't good enough, so I couldn't just drink it in the way I can English. So I actually spent a couple of years working at nights and translated that essay. And then in 2002 I sent my efforts to La Planche and that's how a conversation began with him. By then I'd read some other of his work as well. There was excellent translation, although we've redone it, of New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, which just came out in. In 2017. But the initial translation, almost right after he wrote it. He wrote it in 87, was done by David Macy, terrific translator. At any rate, I developed a correspondence with Laplanche and eventually took on translating his most recent work, which came out, I guess, in 2011, in English, 2007 in French. The English title is Freud and the Sexual, where sexual is a new word in French and meant to indicate basically polymorphous, perverse sexuality, the infantile sexuality, the expanded sense of that Freud gives the notion of sexuality.
- [17:37]
Philip Lance
Okay, so that's keeping us close to this question of why is Laplanche important? Sexuality keeps coming up. And he really put sexuality at the center of the psychoanalytic project. And maybe you can say more about that. But I wanted to also go back to. You mentioned the language of psychoanalysis, which people who are new to the field or some candidates might even know what that book is. It's kind of an encyclopedia writer, a dictionary of psychoanalysis. But would you say it's very. I don't think I realized when I used to consult it. How is it in a particularly Laplanchie and Le Pontali take on Freud, or does it try to be kind of neutral in terms of ways of understanding Freud?
- [18:28]
Jonathan House
I think that while I wouldn't even call it a dictionary or encyclopedia, those are fair comments at it. They're really small little essays and an attempt to give a sense of the meaning of words in Freud's work. So like all of Laplanche and in some ways, like French psychoanalysis in all of its variations, quite generally, there's a much greater emphasis on starting out with Freud and moving on from there. So this is more the expicacion du text in the sense of. Here's how Freud uses the word. Here's what it means in Freud. Neutral, yes, to the extent that anything can be. And then there's also. Even the little essays, of course, are translated into English. A brilliant translation by Donald Nicholson Smith. But, you know, one could raise questions about every detail of the work and the translations, much like Strachey's translation raises all sorts of questions. But the centerpiece of Laplanche is definitely some notion, if you want to use a Lacanian notion of a return to Freud. In some ways, one could question whether Lacan is really a return to Freud. He takes off from Freud and goes in very creative directions, but a more scholarly approach to understanding Freud. It comes from La Planche and, you know, the Planche and Pompalyse. And it's a project, in a sense, that Laplanche did continued in two ways. First in his own developing theory, the centerpiece is that New Directions New Foundations for psychoanalysis in 87. But in addition to his own work and developing theorizing, he was the head of the group who over 30 years fully translated all of Freud's work from the German into French, making good use of Strachey's translation into English, but having the advantage of coming after the standard edition and in addition, having access to much more of Freud's, many more of Freud's texts than Strachey and his team had. So Laplanche, who died in 2012, got to see the last volumes of that published, except for the index. I think his relationship to Freud is a deep one. The phrase he uses, Laplanche, is he wants to put Freud to work. And what that one way to understand that is something I remember, I think, not misquoting him. Roy Schaeffer once said there isn't a single page of Freud on which he isn't profoundly wrong. And yet there's another of the great Freud scholars, incidentally, right, Roy Schaeber. And yet where he's wrong, he's often both asking new questions that are still questions. And even this is more me than Roy. And even where he's profoundly and obviously wrong, sometimes the answers he's giving are still the best ones we have. So if you take that paradox for a second, the question becomes, Freud was an awfully bright fellow and he had some very good ideas. So if he's going way off the track, there must be some reason that this rather smart fellow is saying contradictory and foolish things. And God knows he says contradictory and foolish things. So if we don't just take that and dismiss that stuff, but say, wait, there's something interesting here because he's trying to answer something, and maybe there's something about the answer, something about the question that makes it quite hard to answer. If we get to that, for instance, what's special about sexuality might be a good example. We can find out why Freud is having such a problem. Maybe we can take a step beyond what he was able to do.
- [23:29]
Philip Lance
Yeah. And that's what Laplanche does. And I have to say, as I've begun sort of dipping into Laplanche, it's been really exciting to me to sort of rediscover, maybe discover really for the first time how Freud makes sense in a way he didn't when I was originally studying during candidacy, and especially around sexuality. So in my sessions with clients, when sexuality begins to arise, it's Exciting because not only it's fun to talk about sexuality, but because I feel like we're actually getting to the unconscious and the way that Freud understood it, at least as Laplanche says, Freud understood it. So let's say that somebody like me wants to really begin learning Laplanche. What would be a course of study? So obviously this book we're talking about today, an introduction, seems like it would be a good place to begin. But what would you. You kind of actually laid out for me some ways of going into it in an email you sent to me at the beginning when I first contacted you. But can you give us some thoughts about how to learn Laplanche?
- [24:44]
Jonathan House
Yes, I would say three possibilities or anyway, one. The simplest really is to get his last collection of essays in French. It was sexual that I mentioned and the subtitle was La Sexualite et l' angie aux sans Freudien. So translating it, Sexual Sexuality Enlarged in the Freudian sense. And it's a collection of his essays from 2000 to 2006. And he only wrote, you know, very little after that. And it's in English, it's published by the Unconscious in translation with the title Freud and the Sexual with sexual in italics to show that it has an unusual meaning here. And in that book, I generally recommend about four chapters, chapters 1, 2, 5 and 10 to then each one is about 20 pages, maybe 25. Big print, large margins, many, much space between the lines. I mean, it's. It's not. It's not. It's not a ponderous read. Some of it's really fun. Laplanche can, in his late work, as this was, is a lot more fun to read than in some ways than his earlier work, which is denser. So I would. That would be sort of starting and get a sense of where Laplanche arrives by the time he's integrated all of his study over 40, 50 years. Another way to do it would be to begin sort of when La Planche takes off. Well, a little bit of history for Laplanche maybe here. Laplanche was grew up in Burgundy, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, when during the war he helped out in the Resistance, carrying messages in the handlebars of his bike. And both in Paris and in Burgundy, he was the second son. So he was sort of sent off to Paris to become an intellectual and went to the, you know, sort of the most intellectual of schools that prepares for the Ecole Normale Superior. And he went into philosophy, where he sort of partners in that with Pontalys there each two of them would have an older student who was help them as graduate students. And their older sort of tutor still also a graduate student, was Altusser. So I mean, it was an amazing time, you know, with Merleau, Ponty was one of their teachers, Sartre. It was a quite remarkable time during and especially just after the war. So Laplanche gets interested in psychoanalysis, goes into analysis with Lacan. Lacan tells him, well, if you want to be an analyst, you got to become a psychiatrist. So in a couple of years time, Laplanche, in addition to being a major philosopher, becomes a psychiatrist, spends a year at Harvard too. And in the early 60s, in about 1959, 60, he and a number of other people who had been in the same circle as Lacan and had been his student and his analyst. Anne breaks with him intellectually, but as he once said to me, Lacan was very tolerant of intellectual differences until one broke with him politically, or one could say, until Lacan took off politically. So by 1960, for instance, Laplanche, at a major conference on the unconscious, takes the position that the unconscious is not structured like a language, just to be how early. But the break with Lacan really comes a couple of years later, when Lacan founds his own school. The whole long history won't get into. But at any rate, he writes then these two things with Pontalyse, the language of psychoanalysis, the dictionary or encyclopedia and this essay that's in the book that we're talking about. In 1970, he writes life and death and psychoanalysis. Then there follow ongoing lots of essays that are published. La Planche is teaching as a seminar at the Sorbonne, I think it was at Parisette. And his lectures are many of them. Each semester, or sometimes two semesters worth of lectures were published in a series of volumes called Problematique 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, until in 87 he does a quite remarkable synthesis, which is the new Foundations. Then after that again continuing to publish articles and give talks and so forth, which are collected in a number of volumes there. There are some other books, one on sexuality, one on apres coup, which later called problematique 6 and 7 and I guess and really. And then the collections of his. Of his essays. Simultaneously he's running the translation of Freud with the colleagues he'd been working with for 20, 30 years. I think I've gone off. But then in France he becomes an important figure. But perhaps unlike Lacan, unlike Andre Green, unlike a number of important psychoanalysts and theoreticians, he doesn't found a school of his own. And maybe in part that's because his writing almost never goes into clinical cases, clinical examples, even. So, it may have been harder for people to rally around that. Also, his style was rather less. He didn't seem to. Not that he wasn't very firm in his opinions and could be a difficult man to work with, but he didn't seem to want to have a. A followership in the same way that some others did. And. And which, incidentally, I don't think is a bad idea. I think it's. You know, as a devoted Laplanche follower at the moment, you know, I don't think it's that thing at all. But it's. At any rate, Andre Green, unlike. Unlike. Okay, Lacan. Unlike the fourth group, he was affiliated with the. What's the. Of the two big institutes that are affiliated with the ipa, the one is the spp. That's the biggest one. And then there's the apf, which is smaller and more uber intellectual kind of thing. And that was Laplanche. I'll give one other interesting note about Laplanche. After the war, he founded, with Castoriadis and Claude Lefeur and some others, a group called Socialism or Barbarism, and they published a journal of that under that name as well. And it was, again, you know, for me, almost unbearably arcane, intellectual Marxist work, at least. I have a hard time with Castoriadis. Brilliant stuff, but hard to read. And anyway, so he was very involved on the left, both during the war and the Resistance and then after the war. But in many, that certainly isn't reflected in any direct way in his analytic writing.
- [34:18]
Philip Lance
Okay. I'm holding another question in mind, which I think I'll insert now, which is. So, as we're understanding, how would one begin to learn La Planche? There's reading his actual writings, many of which you've translated, beginning that book you just mentioned, the sexual, which I can't say. And I read those chapters. Those are great. But another way to learn theorists is by reading kind of the secondary literature, which could be, for instance, Dominic's introduction essay to the book today. La An Introduction. But you also sent me another.
- [34:55]
Jonathan House
You'll have to tell me. I love Dominique's essay. I think that that is, however, a bit more difficult than reading actually the primary text. He goes. Because he's really covering. It's a very insightful essay into La Planche as a whole. And I mean, it's not a simple text. Dominique, it's brilliant.
- [35:19]
Philip Lance
Yeah, I'm glad you Said that because people listening. We don't always know who our audience is here, and some people are further along than others. But I would say, yeah, that essay by Dominique is difficult, which is why I was going to say there was another one. You introduced me to that essay in the Journal of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, written by a. And I guess he's an interpersonalist. But it was a kind of another sort of long essay on Laplanche.
- [35:48]
Jonathan House
What was his name is Pascal Sauvaire.
- [35:52]
Philip Lance
Yeah, I found that one.
- [35:54]
Jonathan House
He's at the William Allison White. He's great.
- [35:58]
Philip Lance
And that was kind of written in Americanese, I would call it, like, for those of us who grew up in sort of the. That tradition. And. And. And it was an. It was another way into La Planche that I thought would be helpful for people.
- [36:17]
Jonathan House
So that would be one, and I think that one's terrific. And there's another in Japa, Deborah Browning wrote also a book review that covers some overlap with Pascal's Review. They're both book essays, really, and they attempt, in a pretty successful way, I think, both Pascal's and Deborah's works to give a sense of some of the essential conceptual movements of La Planche's work and Deborah's. Deborah's piece. Well, it's Deborah Browning and it's in Japa, so it shouldn't be hard to find and easily available, both of these. I think if you have pep, maybe Pascal's is too recent. Anyone who wants it can email me, and I'd be happy to send them any of this stuff.
- [37:16]
Philip Lance
Let's then also take just maybe five minutes here, and then we'll kind of wind down with sort of final questions, but to sort of dip a little bit into why Laplanche is so important. And I'm trying to think of how to phrase a question that might allow you to expound a little bit about. I think one of the things I found really helpful was when I began to understand the difference between an instinct and a drive. And it seems like, am I right, that Laplanche really helped more than many, maybe anybody, in helping us really begin to think about why that difference is so important. Because I wasn't taught that difference in my first year of candidacy about, Remember.
- [38:03]
Jonathan House
It was entirely erased in the Anglophone universe, much less so in France. So that in the standard edition, there are the word. Two German words are translated with one English word. So trib, which is drive, is translated as instinct, and instinct is translated as instinct. And I think you're right that Le Planche and Pontalys, because I think you can almost find it. All of the basis for the distinction begins to be elaborated in the language of psychoanalysis with him and. And Pontalys. But without getting into that deeply, I think you bring us back then to what is sexuality? The notion that drives refer to sexual drives and instincts, to something else. And it's important to make the distinction. And that by and large, Freud is consistent about the distinction, although he doesn't understand the origin of the distinction, and he keeps trying to mush the two together. But he rarely uses the word instinct, though, not never. And he uses it in a particular way. But I go in many directions here. But let's go back to something you raised at the beginning. The importance of sexuality. And what Laplanche and Pontalyse do. And what Laplanche does is not only to clarify the distinction between instinct and drive, but to point out the problems Freud had just quickly, let me say. So where's sexuality initially in Freud, up until 1897, up until he says, you know, writes that letter of the equinox, September 21, 1897, and he says, you know, I've given up my neurotica. I no longer believe my Neurotica. And what was his neurotica? His Neurotica was his seduction theory, early seduction theory, in which all neuroses of defense, hysteria, and a couple of others have their origin in a child undergoing a sexual approach by an adult, either pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be, resulting, he thought, in different neuroses and that the children then were without sexuality. This is before infantile sexuality up until 1897. And sexuality appears in children, in humans, in the seduction theory, in an intersubjective way. It's the adult who brings sexuality to the child long before instinctual sexuality. In other words, puberty comes about. Then he realizes Freud does that. Wait a second, this doesn't work. There are many people who are hysterics, but who didn't suffer sexual abuse as a child. And although he doesn't give up on the notion that those who did, you know, that it is a cause of problems to be sexually abused as a kid, he never gives up that, but he has to give that up for all the reasons he lists in that letter. And then he's kind of stuck, right? Because his notion is that up until the end of his life, only what is sexual can be repressed, and it's repression that creates the unconscious. So what's a poor boy to do? Freud is kind of stuck here. He needs to somehow have sexuality in children. And if it doesn't come from the outside, it must somehow come from the inside. That's why he says in that famous letter, now I'm thrown back on heredity. Somehow it must be innate. But notice what he's trying to do. He's trying to biologize sexuality. And that's what he does from then on. And in addition, thus biologize the unconscious.
- [42:37]
Philip Lance
And that's where he went astray, I guess. Would Laplanche call that a going astray?
- [42:43]
Jonathan House
Yes. And there's the. The great Laplanche text which have translated. In fact, Donald Nicholson Smith translated it for us, which is problematic. 7 and it was initially published under a variety of titles, but its subtitle has consistently been the Going the Biologizing Going Astray of Sexuality in Freud. And Freud loses track of the intersubjective aspect of the origin of sexuality and thus of the origin of the unconscious. So you can see how central this notion is. And if I, if I had, is there. One major contribution of Laplanche is that. And the names that it runs under are on the one hand the general theory of seduction. So instead of abandoning the seduction theory, Laplanche suggests Freud should have generalized it. And the relationship of a child and the caregiver, the attachment relationship is a relationship between an infant who has no unconscious and adult who does. With the unconscious being understood as quintessentially sexual. Then of course the question of what is sexual infantile sexuality comes up. But that's one name the general theory of seduction. And the other name that comes late in his work but for the really the same body of concepts is the fundamental anthropological situation. And anthropological here in the sense that Kant might use it or that is, you know, the study of man. What is it to be human? What is it to be a subject? And the fundamental situation is again the child who has little was only beginning to acquire an unconscious in relationship with. Dependent on caretakers and the culture, but caretakers in particular, who have an unconscious in the sense of a repressed unconscious, that is sexual through and through. So those are. That is Laplanche's contribution phrase.
- [45:15]
Philip Lance
I think that probably doesn't exactly explain for people who are newer to this, but it gives them a taste of the. What we get into and the very important, as I've begun to understand it, difference between the instinctual aspects of sexuality, which a lot of us, I think have thought that is sexuality and the drive related components of or dimension of sexuality, which is an inner subjective psychic experience. That comes from the other. And I guess it's so important to begin to make that distinction in terms of where it leads us, in terms of how to understand what we're doing as psychoanalysts. And it's very. It ends up being very different from the object relations kind of approach to the unconscious, as I'm beginning to see and as I learn Laplanche. But let's see, I'm thinking last night I was at a Rigoletto, the LA opera in which there's this seduction of a girl by this duke. And I heard the lady behind me talking about how in those days these seductions were called seductions, but nowadays would call them rape, at least in terms of what happened in this opera. But it was. I thought of Laplanche last night.
- [46:43]
Jonathan House
Let me comment on that. There's a wonderful. In that book, which is a good place to begin, Freud and the sexual. There's a brief essay called Sexual Crime in which Laplanche directly addresses what I'll call the Rigoletto question that. And he says, look, here I am someone who thinks that the origin of the human subject, the origin of sexuality, comes because of the imposition of adult sexuality on the infant and child, unconscious though it may be, as well as, of course, anything conscious. But the key thing being the unconscious, the loving engagement, the attachment relationship, which is parasitized by the adults on sexual unconscious. So am I saying, Laplanche asks rhetorically, that every loving relationship between a mother and a child is a sexual crime, and also asks the question, is all crime sexual? And so it's a delightful piece. It goes back to some of the stuff that happened in Freud's study group, the Wednesday night study group in Vienna in those first years where Freud talks about seduction, where he says the father innocently seduces the daughter, and he uses the word innocent almost three times in rapid succession toward later than her having sexuality and masturbating, whereas the mother is presented in just the opposite sense. It's very guilty. So it's a perfect example of Freud where he's being incredibly insightful and discussing seduction and yet incredibly wrong and stuck in his sexist phallocentric universe. And so he makes this leap forward while he's simultaneously spoiling it, as it were. So it's a. It's a delightful little, I don't know, 1015 page essay by, by Laplanche on exactly that subject.
- [49:09]
Philip Lance
I had no idea when I brought that up. At least I don't think I did. But is that in one. Is that in your book, the Sexual.
- [49:15]
Jonathan House
The one with the Freud and the Sexual. I think it's chapter eight.
- [49:21]
Philip Lance
Okay, I didn't read that one. I will. After having seen Regulator. I'll go read that one and that one last question, because I can't help asking this before we wrap up here. The. So this. This confusion of tongue, this, that Firenze talks about, where the child, the adult sexuality, we, I don't know, say, leans on the child's affection and there's a confusion of tongues in this. This intersubjective happening between these two. The word tongues brings up the word languages. And is that why Laplanche and Pontelis named it the language, their book, the Language of Psychoanalysis? Because psychoanalysis.
- [50:03]
Jonathan House
You've got to blame that one on Donald Nicholson Smith. Their title is Vocabular the Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis. But. But look, language is a big question. And linguists, you know, Lacan and some other French think of linguistics, called it pilot science for psychoanalysis. And the whole structuralist tendency, that's not La Planche or Pontalyse or the other. It doesn't mean that language isn't profoundly important. But Ferenzi. So, for instance, Laplanche talks a good deal about Ferenzy because of the. As you point out, the very obvious overlap between, especially that paper from. What is it was published in 33 or something, the confusion of tongues, and the notion of the adult speaking the language of passion and the child not speaking it. So the confusion of tongues is clearly, is a version of the fundamental anthropological situation. The question is, what are the differences? And so forth. And Laplanche does take that up and does talk a good deal about Ferenzi and that paper.
- [51:31]
Philip Lance
Yeah. So from a Laplanche perspective, what we're doing as psychoanalysts is helping the client to find a language for his or her unconscious which was originally constituted by this seduction scene.
- [51:53]
Jonathan House
Seduction and repression, however inadvertent, however loving it constituted in the attachment situation, the attachment relationship, which can be wonderful or rotten. I mean, that's a. You know, Laplanche writes about the relationship then to attachment theory, which, you know, Freud was not quite so ignorant of as sometimes presented. He talked about those things in terms of self preservation, also in terms of the tender current. Thus Freud. So he had a. Did have a notion about this relationship, which was primarily about attachment and not about sexuality. It's that that relationship can't exist except if there's an adult there to take care of the baby, the child. And if there's an adult there, then there's unconscious sexuality there. Not in the kid, maybe, but certainly in the adult. So what are we helping our patients do? Well, if our patients, and we as subjects generally, are constantly trying to give new meaning, translate elements of our unconscious which can, you know, then be at the origin of our most creative work and the origin of our symptoms, the origin of our dreams, to the extent that it's in the repressed unconscious, there's the human tendency, what makes us a subject, which makes us a human, to give meaning to it, to translate it. So what do we do with patients? Well, both present tense and then, you know, so the here and now, but also the there and then. So not only the transference, but also one's history can be given new meaning. That meaning may never be exhausted. The enigmatic residues of interaction with our caretakers can never be fully translated. It always is a provocation to further translation, further meaning. Thank God. That's what makes us curious. You could say it's, you know, what Freud referred to as, you know, the instinctive research instinct, Drive, really. Or I think Lacan calls it the. Maybe Freud does. The epistemophilic drive, the desire to understand, the desire to know.
- [54:48]
Philip Lance
It does bring us. You were talking about translation there. Translating the Unconscious, which is the name of your project. The Unconscious in Translation, which is my final question, because we're over time, but if people want to buy some of your books, they can go onto Amazon. That's where we usually go. Right. But they can also go directly to your website of the Unconscious and translation. And then. But does it cost more if they buy directly from you, or does it cost.
- [55:13]
Jonathan House
No, no, it costs the same or always less. Really. The website is uitbooks.com. you know, it's unconscious in translation, uit books.com and at the moment, you can get a 20% discount off of everything with the coupon code word Summer. There's almost some kind of sale going on, and it certainly would be nicer for me because Amazon takes such a big cut.
- [55:47]
Philip Lance
Okay, well, I think we all want to support psychoanalytic publishing projects, so that's a little plug for that. We're going to wrap it up, and I just want to thank everybody for listening today. Hopefully you found it very useful. We're here at the New Books and Psychoanalysis podcast. Check out our website and feel free to email me with your comments and questions. Thanks a lot, Jonathan, for doing this today.
- [56:13]
Jonathan House
My pleasure.
- [56:44]
Expedia Narrator
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a full 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
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Jonathan House
Oh, come on.
- [56:56]
Expedia Narrator
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of the trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
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Jonathan House
Whatever.
- [57:07]
Expedia Narrator
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.