Back to Search Start Over

Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other.

Authors :
Fletcher, John
Source :
British Journal of Psychotherapy; Feb2017, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p105-124, 20p
Publication Year :
2017

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present Jean Laplanche's interpretation of the Freudian field as one that is driven and shaped by opposing gravitational pulls. These he represents by developing Freud's analogy of the Copernican and psychoanalytic revolutions to demonstrate the successive decentrings and recentrings of the human subject in relation to a primal and formative other at the level of a psychoanalytic theory that is itself alternately both 'Copernican' and 'Ptolemaic'. In doing so, he replicates those movements at work at the level of the formation of human subjectivity. Focusing on Freud's shifting conceptions of the unconscious, the drive and the id, this paper seeks to show how Laplanche radicalizes certain 'Copernican' elements of Freud's metapsychology to establish the primacy of the other and the dimension of 'primal seduction' in concepts intended by Freud to decentre the narcissistic illusions of the ego, but which are captured by regressive movements of thought, retreating to 'Ptolemaic' conceptions of an endogenous, biologically grounded development of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
02659883
Volume :
33
Issue :
1
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
British Journal of Psychotherapy
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
120845933
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12265