Cathy Caruth

Department of Comparative Literature
Emory University
ccaruth@emory.edu

 

Jean Laplanche has long been recognized as a leading French thinker and psychoanalyst. His pioneering work on Freud’s early writing first revealed the temporal structure of trauma in Freud and its significance for Freud’s notion of sexuality. In his later work, Laplanche has elaborated on this understanding of what he called Freud’s “special seduction theory” in a “general seduction theory,” which examines the origins of the human psyche in the “implantation of the message of the other.” I interviewed him in his home in Paris on October 23, 1994.

 

I. Trauma and Time

 

CC: The seduction theory in Freud’s early work, which traces adult neurosis back to early childhood molestation, is generally understood today as representing a direct link between psychic life and external events.¹ When people refer to this period of Freud’s work in contemporary debates, they tend to refer to it as a time in which Freud still made a place for the reality and effects of external violence in the human psyche. In your understanding of the seduction theory, on the other hand, the theory does not provide a simple locating of external reality in relation to the psyche. As a matter of fact, your temporal reading of seduction trauma in Freud’s early work would rather suggest a dislocating of any single traumatic “event.” You say specifically, on the basis of your reading of the seduction theory, that there are always at least two scenes that constitute a traumatic “event” (Problématiques III 202), and that the trauma is never locatable in either scene alone but in “the play of ‘deceit’ producing a kind of seesaw effect between the two events” (Life and Death 41).

 

Would you explain what you mean when you say that in Freud, trauma is never contained in a single moment, or that the traumatic “event” is defined by a temporal structure?

 

JL: This question about the seduction theory is important, because the theory of seduction has been completely neglected. When people talk about seduction, they do not talk about the theory of seduction. I would argue that even Freud, when he abandoned the so-called seduction theory, forgot about his theory. He just dismissed the causal fact of seduction. When [Jeffrey] Masson, for example, goes back to the so-called seduction theory, he comes back to the factuality of seduction, but not to the theory, which he completely ignores. To say that seduction is important in the child is not a theory, just an assertion. And to say that Freud neglected the reality of seduction or that Freud came back to this reality, or that Masson comes back to this reality, is not a theory.

 

Now the theory of seduction is very important because it’s highly developed in Freud. The first step I took with [J.-B.] Pontalis a long time ago, in The Language of Psychoanalysis, was to unearth this theory, which has very complicated aspects: temporal aspects, economic aspects, and also topographical aspects.

 

As to the question of external and internal reality, the theory of seduction is more complicated than simply opposing external and internal causality. When Freud said, “Now I am abandoning the idea of external causality and am turning to fantasy,” he neglected this very dialectical theory he had between the external and the internal. He neglected, that is, the complex play between the external and the internal.

 

His theory explained that trauma, in order to be psychic trauma, never comes simply from outside. That is, even in the first moment it must be internalized, and then afterwards relived, revivified, in order to become an internal trauma. That’s the meaning of his theory that trauma consists of two moments: the trauma, in order to be psychic trauma, doesn’t occur in just one moment. First, there is the implantation of something coming from outside. And this experience, or the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic. It is not the first act which is traumatic, it is the internal reviviscence of this memory that becomes traumatic. That’s Freud’s theory. You find it very carefully elaborated in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in the famous case of Emma (410-13).

 

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

 

CC: So you are saying that, in the beginning, Freud himself never understood seduction as simply outside, or trauma as simply outside, but as a relation between external cause, and something like internal cause. Are you suggesting, then, that when he said that he abandoned the theory, he himself forgot that complex relation? That is, when he told [Wilhelm] Fliess he was turning away from seduction by an adult to the child’s fantasies, that he himself misunderstood his own seduction theory as being only about external causality (Freud, Origins Letter 69, 215ff.)?

 

JL: Yes, something like that. I think that when he abandoned the theory, he in fact forgot the very complexity of the theory.

 

CC: You have just explained this complexity in terms of the relation between the first and second moments of the trauma: you say that in order to be psychic the memory of the original implantation must be revivified. In your written work, you describe this relation between the original moment and its revivification in terms of Nachträglichkeit. This term, used by Freud, is usually translated as “belatedness” and is understood to refer to the belated effect of the traumatizing event. But you are careful to distinguish various interpretations and translations of the word. Would you explain the various meanings of Nachträglichkeit and your own alternative understanding of Freud’s use of the term?

 

JL: We translate Nachträglichkeit in French as après-coup, and in English I have proposed that it be translated as “afterwardsness,” which is now gaining acceptance. After all, the English language can use such words with “ness.” I read something about “white-hat-edness,” so why not afterwardsness?

 

Now this is not only a question of finding a word. Because in the translations of Freud, the full sense of Nachträglichkeit was not preserved. Even in Masson’s translation of the Fliess letters, he doesn’t preserve the full complexity of Nachträglichkeit (Complete Letters). This is very important because there are two directions in afterwardsness, and those two directions he translates by different words. The phrase “deferred action” describes one direction, and the phrase “after the event” describes the other direction. So even in Masson’s translation the seduction theory is split.

 

CC: So he splits what you have called the deterministic theory, in which the first event determines the second event, and the hermeneutic theory, in which the second event projects, retroactively, what came before (Laplanche, “Notes” 217-27).²

 

JL: That’s it exactly, yes. Now, this is not so easy. Because even après-coup in French, and “afterwards” in English, have these two meanings. For instance, I can say, “the terrorists put a bomb in the building, and it exploded afterwards.” That’s the direction of deferred action. And I can also say, “this bridge fell down, and the architect understood afterwards that he did not make it right.” That’s an after-the-event understanding; the architect understood afterwards. These are the two meanings.

 

But you have to understand how those two meanings have been put into one meaning in Freud. I think even Freud did not completely grasp these two directions, or the fact that he put them in one and the same theory. Let me quote a passage I have referred to before. It’s a passage from The Intepretation of Dreams, which is very interesting because it’s a long time after Freud has abandoned the seduction theory and even the idea of afterwardsness. But afterwardsness came back again later on. This is his very amusing anecdote:

 

Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman’s breast. A young man who was a great admirer of feminine beauty was talking once–so the story went–of the good-looking wet-nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby: “I’m sorry,” he remarked, “that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.” I was in the habit of quoting this anecdote to explain the factor of deferred action [or as I would say, “afterwardsness”] in the mechanism of the psychoneuroses. (4-5)

 

It’s very interesting because here you have both directions. That is, you can say, on the one hand, that there was sexuality in the small child, and afterwards, this man, who was once a small child, becomes excited again when he sees himself as a small child. That is the direction of determinism: sexuality is in the small child, and afterwards, as a deferred action, it’s reactivated in the adult. Or, on the other hand, you can say that it’s just a matter of the reinterpretion of the adult: there is no sexuality in the small child, the small child is just sucking the milk, but the older man, as a sexual being, resexualizes the spectacle.

 

So for Freud there were two ways of explaining afterwardsness, but I don’t think he ever saw that there must be some synthesis of those two directions. Now the only possible synthesis is to take into account what he doesn’t take into account, that is, the wet nurse. If you don’t take into account the wet nurse herself, and what she contributes when she gives the breast to the child–if you don’t have in mind the external person, that is, the stranger, and the strangeness of the other–you cannot grasp both directions implicit in afterwardsness.

 

CC: So to understand the truly temporal aspect of Nachträglichkeit, or afterwardsness, you have to take into account what is not known, both at the beginning, and later. What is radically not known.

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: Whereas the other two models of afterwardsness imply either knowing later, or maybe implicitly, biologically, knowing earlier.

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: There’s too much knowledge, in a way, in the first two models, but in what you describe, there’s something that remains uninterpreted or unassimilated.

 

JL: Well, what I mean is that if you try to understand afterwardsness only from the point of view of this man, being first a baby and then an adult, you cannot understand afterwardsness. That is, if you don’t start from the other, and from the category of the message, you cannot understand afterwardsness. You are left with a dilemma that is impossible to resolve: either the past determines the future, or the future reinterprets the past.

 

CC: Another way in which you have talked about this position of the other in trauma is in terms of a model which is less temporal than spatial. You note that the word “trauma,” in its three uses in Freud (as physical trauma, as psychic trauma, and as the concept of the traumatic neuroses) centers around the notion of piercing or pentrating, the notion of “effraction” or wounding (“Traumatisme” 257ff). This notion of wounding seems to imply a spatial model, in which the reality of the trauma originates “outside” an organism which is violently imposed upon. You have suggested that the temporal and spatial models are complementary (“Traumatisme” 258), and I am wondering what the spatial model can add to our understanding of the role of the other in trauma.

 

JL: One might ask, since I have emphasized a temporal model of trauma, what need is there to go back to a spatial one, to what is called the structure of the psychic apparatus? Now the spatial model is first of all a biological model. That is, an organism has an envelope, and something happens inside, which is homeostatic, and something is outside. There is no need of psychoanalysis in order to understand that. Biologists understand that. But when I speak of “outside,” I am not speaking of an outside in relation to this envelope, I am speaking of something very much more “outside” than this, that extraneity, or strangeness, which, for the human being, is not a question of the outside world. As you know, many psychoanalysts have tried to produce a theory of knowledge. We don’t need a theory of knowledge. Psychoanalysis is not a theory of knowledge as a whole. The problem of the other in psychoanalysis is not a problem of the outside world. We don’t need psychoanalysis to understand why I give some realities to this scale, to this chair, and so on. That’s not a problem. The problem is the reality of the other, and of his message.³

 

CC: The reality of the other.

 

JL: The reality of the other. Now this reality is absolutely bound to his strangeness. How does the human being, the baby, encounter this strangeness? It is in the fact that the messages he receives are enigmatic. His messages are enigmatic because those messages are strange to themselves. That is, if the other was not himself invaded by his own other, his internal other, that is, the unconscious, the messages wouldn’t be strange and enigmatic. So the problem of the other is strictly bound to the fact that the small human being has no unconscious, and he is confronted with messages invaded by the unconscious of the other. When I speak now of the other, I speak of the concrete other, I don’t speak in Lacanian terms, with a big O or a big A. I speak of the concrete other, each other person, adult person, which has to care for the baby.

 

CC: So the figure of wounding or “piercing,” as a model of trauma, does not have so much to do with, let’s say, a metaphor of the body, but rather with this invasion of the unconscious of the other?

 

JL: Yes. Nevertheless the topographical model is very important, because the very constitution of this topography of the psychic apparatus is bound up with the fact that the small human being has to cope with this strangeness. And his way of coping with this strangeness is to build an ego. And as I have said elsewhere, Freud’s topography is from the point of view of the ego.

 

So it is in relation to the seduction theory that the subject builds himself as an individual. He Ptolemizes himself, being at the very beginning Copernican, that is, circulating around the other’s message. He has to internalize this, and he builds an inside in order to internalize (Laplanche, “Unfinished Copernican”).

 

CC: So the trauma or the seduction, in your terms, anticipates or precedes or originates that envelope.

 

JL: Yes, that building of the psychic structure. So I don’t think the ego is something bound to psychology in general. It is bound to the very fact that we have to cope with the strangeness of the message.

 

CC: And thus the ego is very closely linked to this temporal structure of originary seduction too.

 

JL: Yes, absolutely. It’s bound, I would say, to the second moment, that is, the moment where the message is in some way already implanted, but not yet processed. And to process it, that is to translate it, the ego has to build itself as a structure.

 

CC: Is that why the ego is, after that, always open to the possibility of being traumatized again?

 

JL: Yes, yes. The other traumas of the adult, or later traumas, are to be understood with the ego already in place, and the first trauma, which is not trauma, but seduction–the first seduction–is the way the ego builds itself.

 

CC: So in every subsequent trauma there is always a relation between the specific event, whether it’s a real seduction or a car accident or whatever, and the originary founding of the ego.

 

JL: Yes.

 

II. Sexuality and Trauma

 

CC: As you point out, in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, after Freud “abandons” the seduction theory in 1897 he continues to develop various aspects of it in different ways throughout his work, but it no longer appears to have the same familial (or even sexual) character. When trauma reappears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example, it is linked to “accidents” and war events, first of all, and ultimately to foundational moments of consciousness and the drive. In your own work, however, you insist that it might be possible, even in the example of the train accident, to link the seduction theory of trauma to a non-sexual theory:

 

With any disturbance, even if it is not specifically sexual–for example the train trip, or the train accident–a sexual drive can be released and, in the case of the train accident, it is really an unleashing of the drive, traumatizing the ego from the inside on its internal periphery. In other words, it is not the direct mechanical impact that is traumatic; it requires a relay of sexual excitation, and it is this flood of sexual excitation that is traumatizing for the psychic apparatus. (Laplanche, Problématiques I 218)

 

Your insistence on the sexual dimension of the accident, here, seems allied to your own general interest in the language of seduction and the earlier seduction theory. In what way does Beyond the Pleasure Principle retain elements of the seduction theory?

 

JL: Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a very complex text, which must be completely dismantled. It is a speculative text, and it has to be interpreted from the very beginning to the end. It’s a text which, I would say, follows the logic of the cauldron: the cauldron was not broken, you never gave me the cauldron in the first place, and so on. This is the logic of this text. So this text must be dismantled, it cannot be taken just as a form of reasoning; there are ruptures in the reasoning. And it’s all in the ruptures.

 

For me, the significance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle lies in the fact that Freud was beginning to forget the destructive character of sexuality. This started with the introduction of narcissism. After the introduction of narcissism, sexuality was enrolled under the banner of totality and of love: of love as a totality, of love of the object as a totality. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a way of Freud’s saying, “sexuality is, in the end, something more disruptive than I thought in narcissism, which is only Eros, that is, the binding aspect of sexuality. Beyond this Eros, no, not ‘beyond’ but before–”

 

CC: Jenseits—

 

JL: Yes, “jenseits of this Eros, this is what I first discovered: the fact that sexuality is unbound, in its unconscious aspects.” In my opinion, that is the meaning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

 

CC: Is there also something new that he discovers as a consequence of his forgetting?

 

JL: Well, what he discovers, which is a very important discovery, is narcissism. That’s one of the most important discoveries of Freud. The discovery in 1915 of narcissism (Freud, “On Narcissism”). But the danger of the discovery of narcissism as love of oneself as a totality, and love of the other as a total object, was precisely his forgetting that there is something not totalizing in sexuality.

 

CC: Doesn’t he also introduce, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the importance of death, since now trauma becomes linked to death, to accidents that threaten your life?

 

JL: The traumas that Freud treats there are adult traumas. And they are usually gross traumas, train accidents and so on. Now there are many interesting points in this regard, which have to be reinterpreted. First, he says, the dreams of the traumatic neuroses prove that some dreams are not the accomplishment of desire. But he did not try to analyze those dreams. He simply took them for their manifest content. That’s very strange, to see Freud being fascinated by the manifest content of those dreams, and not being able to see that even those dreams could be analyzed. They are repetitive, but they are not completely repetitive; there are always some points where the analytic method could be used. And this he forgets completely. That’s my first point.

 

My second point would be more positive. It’s very interesting to take seriously the fact that when the trauma is associated with a wound, a corporeal wound, there is usually no psychic trauma. It’s just trauma in the medical sense, as in an earthquake and so on; you also have traumas in the medical sense of the word. And the observation is very interesting that if there is some wounding the trauma does not become psychic trauma.

 

Now the other point which is important is that he says all traumas make sexuality active again, that is, by developing sexual excitement.⁴ This question of adult trauma, I think, has to be examined through experience. One of my followers, Sylvia Bleichmar, who is Argentinian, was in Mexico at the time of the big earthquake in Mexico. She had a team of people trying to treat the post-earthquake traumas. And what was important even in that treatment was analytic work. Even in so-called physical trauma, the way to find a point of entry was in what was psychic, in how it revived something from infancy. If there weren’t this revival of something personal and sexual, there would be no way of coping with those traumas. In this context she has made some important inroads concerning the resymbolization of trauma.

 

CC: When you say, “if there weren’t a revival of something personal and sexual,” what do you mean by “sexual”?

 

JL: I mean that, ultimately, a trauma like that may be–and this is very strange–in consonance with something like a message. After all, even an earthquake could be taken in as a message. Not just something that is factual, but something that means something to you.

 

CC: And that message is, in some sense, linked to origins.

 

JL: Linked to earlier messages.

 

CC: Then it’s a message that resists your understanding: the meaning of it is partly that you can’t assimilate the message fully.

 

JL: Yes. But at the same time, if there is not something enigmatic in those gross traumas, something where you must ask a question–why this? why did this happen to me?–there wouldn’t be a way of symbolizing them.

 

CC: Do you think that what is called flashback or repetition, the constant return of the message in dreams and so on, could be understood as the imposition of that question, what does this mean?

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: In that case, if we could go back to the dream, you said Freud forgets that the dream can be interpreted. But could you reinterpret the dream in this context as being, not exactly literal, but also not a symbol in the normal sense, because it has to do with this enigmatic message? I mean, isn’t there a difference still between traumatic nightmares and other kinds of nightmares?

 

JL: Yes. There’s certainly something that resists interpretation. But we have something similar in symbolic dreams, dreams that have an overtly symbolic content: there are dreams that impose on you by the fact that there are themes in which there is nothing to interpret after all. That is a repetition too. We have this experience in the dreams of our neurotic patients; sometimes they bring you a dream which is so real, which is a repetition of what happened yesterday, and they say, “there is nothing to interpret.” So I’m very skeptical about the impossibility of interpreting those traumatic dreams.

 

CC: Could you say perhaps, though, that traumatic nightmares are linked in a more direct way to the originary traumatic message?

 

JL: Yes, there may be a shortcut between them. But in those shortcuts you always have to find the small details, the changing details in such dreams, and it’s those changing small details that can be the starting point of the analytic method, which is interpretation and free association.

 

CC: You mean what changes in them–

 

JL: Yes, what changes even in these dreams as well. Freud said the repetitions are the same, but they are not always the same, and that’s the difference that makes all the difference.

 

III. The Primal Situation

 

CC: This brings me to your own rethinking of what you call the “special seduction theory” of Freud in terms of a “general seduction theory,” or the origination of human consciousness and sexuality in the “implantation of the enigmatic message of the other.” Your own theory of seduction seems to involve the larger philosophical and foundational quality of Freud’s later work on trauma, while insisting on the story of the “scene of seduction” from the earlier work. Would you explain what you mean by “primal seduction” and the “implantation of an enigmatic message,” and why you insist on retaining, in this philosophical context, the language of seduction? What is the relation between a universal foundational structure or moment (the primal seduction trauma) and the contingency of the accidental or unprepared for that is so central to the notion of psychic trauma?

 

JL: For me, seduction must be understood as a primal situation. That is, it goes back to the constitution of the unconscious. And seductions–infantile seduction or adult seductions, seductions in everyday life–are derived from this original situation. This original situation, as I understand it, involves an adult who has an unconscious–I’m very realistic, I say “he has an unconscious,” I’m not afraid to say that, I think that seems very strange to philosophers, “he has an unconscious,” like a bag behind him–

 

CC: It’s our baggage!

 

JL: It’s our baggage, yes. So, the original situation is the confrontation of an adult, who has an unconscious, and the child or infant, who at the beginning has no unconscious–that is, he doesn’t have this baggage behind him. (You must understand that I am completely against the idea that the unconscious could be something biological or inherited. I think the idea of an inherited unconscious is something that has to be forgotten.) The unconscious of the adult is very deeply moved and revived by this confrontation with the infant. And especially his perverse sexuality–in the Freudian sense of “perverse,” that is, not perversity as an overt perversion, but the perverse sexuality of the human being that involves not only genitality but all the pregenital trends (I wouldn’t say stages, but trends).

 

Now, you asked me why I keep sexuality in this. This question seems very odd to me because, at this very moment, sexuality in the United States is being put on trial, especially by the children who say that they were sexually attacked. And so sexuality is everywhere, it is in every court, in every trial. I would say that this is a way to forget the idea of generalized sexuality, which Freud has put forward. That is, sexuality cannot be identified with specific forms of perversity, it’s not just something that can be isolated here and there. Perversion, rather, is in everyone, as an important component of sexuality. What Freud has shown, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, is that in every adult’s so-called normal sexuality, there is perversion: there is perversion in the means of taking pleasure, in the forepleasure, and also in the fantasies. So why sexuality? I say that there is much more sexuality than they think in those trials. More sexuality, that is, in the sense that sexuality and perverse sexuality are everywhere in the most “innocent” relation of parent and child. And there is no reason to make a trial about that!

 

Coming back to this story of the wet nurse, something has been forgotten, I would say, not only in the United States (and France) but by all of psychoanalysis. Let’s take the Kleinians for example. They speak of the breast, the good breast, the bad breast, the breast as the first object, and how you have to internalize it and so on. But there is more to understanding sexual life. Who before me has reminded people that the breast was an erotic organ for the woman? That is, the breast is something that is a part of the sexuality of the woman. And why is this sexuality of the breast now forgotten? When one speaks of the relation of the child to this breast, why does one forget this very fact of its sexuality? Now the fact that there is no reason to make a split between the sexual breast and the nursing breast has been noted by many pediatricians, who point out that many women have sexual pleasure in nursing, although they don’t dare to acknowledge it. This has been noted by many gynecologists, pediatricians and so on. Even ancient psychiatrists noted a long time ago those sexual feelings and sexual fantasies in the person who watched over the child. So why sexuality? I say rather, why the forgetting of sexuality in the very fact of nursing?

 

CC: Why do you think there is a forgetting of sexuality?

 

JL: Well, the discovery of Freud was very important for generalized sexuality, but he did not go back to this point. Maybe there are some places where he touches on it, perhaps in the Leonardo essay, but very few places where he deals directly with that issue. Freud talked about many erotogenic zones, but he never talked about the erotogenic zone of the breast. For me there’s something missing there in the theory, including how the erotogenic zone develops in the woman (and also in men sometimes).

 

But what’s important for me is not just the fact that the woman may have some pleasure in nursing, but the fact that something passes from the nursing person to the child, as an enigma. That is, something passes of what I call a message. And the most important thing is not the breast as a shape, as a whole, as an object, but the breast as conveying a message to the child. And this message is invaded by sexuality.

 

CC: And that would also mean, then, that it is invaded by something that neither mother nor baby can fully know.

 

JL: Yes, absolutely. Something that is unconscious, mostly unconscious sexuality. Sometimes it is also partly conscious, but there is always something going back to the unconscious, and to the very personal history of the person.

 

CC: So in this case sexuality also means that which remains enigmatic.

 

JL: Yes, what remains unconscious, enigmatic.

 

CC: In regard to this role of the other, you have suggested that by introducing the mother (or the other) into the temporal scheme of trauma, the reality of trauma, as a temporal structure, can no longer be thought of in terms of a dual model:

 

If one introduces a third term into this scene–that is, the nurse and her own sexuality–which is only at best vaguely sensed by the baby–then it is no longer possible to consider afterwardsness in dual terms. (Seduction, Translation 221-2)

 

What is the relation between the other and temporality in your model?

 

JL: In a paper of mine on temporality I speak of the other as immobile motor. Remember Aristotle’s image of God… but I’m not a theologian. What I mean is that the temporality of afterwardsness develops in the child, but the message of the mother itself is not temporal. It is rather atemporal, simultaneous. That is, what is going to develop itself as temporality in the child is simultaneous in the mother. It is a simultaneity of the message which, at the same time, and at the same moment–in the same message–is self-preservative, and sexual. It is compromised by sexuality. And to go back to this model of the wet-nurse, perverse sexuality is in the very atemporality of the adult. So I wouldn’t say there is a passage of temporality from the adult to the child. I would say rather that there is a concentration in something that is not temporal, that is, the compromised message of the other.

 

CC: You say that the message in the adult is not temporal. If the message is enigmatic, which means it contains or conveys some of the unconscious of the mother, and if that unconsciousness in the mother is also formed around an originary seduction, what has happened to the temporality of that seduction?

 

JL: When sexuality has been repressed, let’s say, in the adult, it becomes unconscious, and in the unconscious there is no temporality. So I would say there is something that is extracted from temporality.

 

CC: Is that why it’s compromised?

 

JL: Yes. That’s the reason why it’s compromised. And I understand “compromised” as something not temporal, not bound to temporality. Except that our work, our psychoanalytic work is to retemporalize it. The very representations of signifiers that have been repressed are from then on subjected to temporality.

 

CC: So that’s why, in order to be passed on, the message cannot be completely temporal.

 

JL: When it is passed on, it is passed on as something simultaneous. And from then on, the child develops a temporal dialectic, that is, a traumatic dialectic, first receiving the message, and then reinterpreting it in a second moment.

 

CC: When you speak of the passing on of a compromised message, you are speaking of something repressed and unconscious. In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, along the same lines, you suggest that the theory of seduction, or a traumatic model of sexuality, can be linked to the more general theory of repression in Freud, through the distinction between primal repression and secondary repression. For most trauma psychiatrists today (in the U.S., at least), the theory of trauma and the theory of repression are opposed, since repression doesn’t engage the same temporal structure as trauma. How do you link the two?

 

JL: I’m mostly interested in the humanizing trauma. That is, the first trauma, which most people wouldn’t describe as trauma: the originary seduction of the normal, average subject or future neurotic subject (not the psychotic). So I have been much more interested in that aspect of trauma that ultimately leads to repression and restructuration, as opposed to something that has not been translated. Now, I completely agree that in the frame of the two-moment theory of trauma and seduction, one has to ask the reason why, in many instances, there is no second moment, or why the second moment is hampered or paralyzed. And that is really the trauma which cannot be reinterpreted, which is implantation, what I call intromission (“Implantation” 355-58). And here we come back to the question of psychosis, and to the question of the super-ego. Because I think that in some way the messages that become super-ego messages are messages that are not being translated. So I would speak of the super-ego as some kind of psychotic enclave in everyone, something that consists in part of messages that cannot be translated.

 

CC: Did you say that in some instances there is no second moment?

 

JL: Sometimes there is no second moment. In everyone. I think that there are some things that are not repressed after all.

 

IV. The Other and Death

 

CC: We have been speaking about the role of the other in trauma and primal seduction. In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, your analysis of seduction trauma takes place within a larger framework, in which you analyze, on the one hand, the relation between the vital order and sexuality (in Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), and on the other hand the relation between sexuality (now including the vital order) and death (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle)–hence the title of your book, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. In the introduction to that book, moreover, you talk about the significance of death for Freud:

 

Might it be that death–human death as finitude and not the sole reduction to zero of vital tensions–finds its place, in psychoanalysis, in a dimension which is more ethical than explanatory?… [Freud says,] “If you would endure life, prepare for death.”
….

 

More modestly perhaps in relation to the temptations of the heroic formulation, “If you want life, prepare for death” might be translated as “If you want life, prepare for the death of the other.” If a certain ethic in relation to death might be evolved from the Freudian attitude, it would be in the sense of a distrust concerning every form of enthusiasm, and of a lucidity that does not hide the irreducible meshing of my death with that of the other. (6)

 

Is there a relation between the role of the other in the seduction theory and the relation between the other and death in psychoanalysis?

 

JL: I’m afraid that the more that I advance in my thinking, the more I disintricate the question of death, the enigma of death, and the so-called death drive of Freud.

 

CC: You take them apart?

 

JL: Yes. That’s why I’m very critical about the term “death drive,” and why I have called it a sexual death drive, with the emphasis more on “sexual” than on “death.” For me, the sexual death drive is just sexuality, unbound sexuality, the extreme of sexuality. And more than death, I would point to primary masochism. I see more of a sense of the sexual death drive in masochism or in sado-masochism than in death. And it was not on the side of sadism, but on the side of masochism, that Freud placed the core of his death drive.

 

Now as to the question of death–in the sense that we are all subject to the question of death and to the enigma of death–I wouldn’t say it is as primal as some people would have it. We all know that infants up to a certain point in their development don’t know death and don’t have any questions about death. I see the issue in a very Freudian manner, or at least from a certain perspective of Freudian thought. I would say that the question of the enigma of death is brought to the subject by the other. That is, it is the other’s death that raises the question of death. Not the existentialist question, “why should I die?” The question, “why should I die?” is secondary to the question, “why should the other die?,” “why did the other die?” and so on.

 

CC: When or how does that question of the other’s death get put to the subject?

 

JL: Well it’s put at very different times in everyone’s life. And it’s also bound to absence. I don’t think that metaphysical questioning about one’s own death is primary. It doesn’t mean it’s not important, but I think it comes from the question, “why should the other die?”

 

CC: So would you say, then, that it is not necessarily linked to the implantation of the enigmatic message?

 

JL: I don’t think it’s bound to the very first enigmatic messages. But there are enigmas that come afterwards.

 

CC: By suggesting that the question of death is raised through the death of the other, you seem to be returning now to the notion that death is situated in an “ethical dimension.” Can you say more about what that means?

 

JL: I am a little surprised to hear you ask about ethics, because in my opinion the alterity of the unconscious in everyone has very little to do with ethics. I would say that it is deeply antimoral.

 

CC: I am not referring to ethics in the sense of everyday morality, but rather in relation to your comments in the introduction to Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, where you say that death as a finitude might ultimately be placed in an ethical dimension, rather than an explanatory dimension in Freud. And I wanted to understand what you meant.

 

JL: Oh yes, sure, sure, yes…. I agree with you that an ethical dimension is introduced by the question of the death of the other. But I don’t think there is a link to the primal seduction; I would see it a little after. Even in the Oedipal situation, which includes the question of the death of the other.

 

CC: Maybe when you said to me, at the very beginning of this interview, that for psychoanalysis the question is not about knowing but about the reality of the other, perhaps that’s what you mean by ethics. That is, it is not about epistemology, but rather about confronting the reality of the other.

 

JL: Yes. And especially in regard to knowing, I would repeat what I have said about knowledge as an intellectual process: when I speak of translation or interpretation by the individual, I don’t mean an intellectual way of processing messages. Because they are processed in many languages, that is, also in an affective language or an image-language. I don’t see the question of translating as having to do with intellectual translation.

 

CC: So there, too, it’s not about knowing something, but about being linked to the other.

 

JL: Yes.

 

V. Translation and De-Translation

 

CC: When you discuss the role of the other in the original seduction, you also use a specifically linguistic terminology (the implantation of the “message” of the other). Likewise, your interpretation of repression and the drive, as well as of psychoanalytic work, is tied to what seems to be a linguistic terminology of “translation” and “detranslation.” Can you say more about the meaning of these terms and about their specific significance as linguistic terms?

 

JL: I wouldn’t say my view is a linguistic point of view; it is much less so than Lacan’s and some others’. And up to now my linguistic vocabulary has been very minimal. But why do I use the term “translation”? When I use this term, it is a linguistic metaphor, in the sense that Jakobson speaks of translation. Which means not only verbal, linguistic translation, but also inter-semiotic translation, that is, from one type of language to another. So if I take translation as a model that is verbal, it’s just a model. And for me, when Freud, in his famous letter 52, speaks of translation or the failure of translation, he doesn’t mean translation into words (Origins 173ff). He means translation into what he sometimes calls drive language, or a type of drive language. You may also have a translation into a type of code which is internal to language, for instance, the castration code or the Oedipus myth, which is a type of code into which you can translate something.

 

So why do I speak of translation and not of interpretation? Interpretation may mean that you interpret some factual situation. Translation means that there is no factual situation that can be translated. If something is translated, it’s already a message. That means, you can only translate what has already been put in communication, or made as a communication. That’s why I speak of translation rather than of understanding or interpretation.

 

CC: It also has to do with the message and its enigma.

 

JL: Yes. I’m very interested, now, in the debate with hermeneutics. One of my last papers is called “Psychoanalysis as Anti-Hermeneutics,” which suggests that the aim of analytic work is not translation but detranslation.⁵ Translation is very important, but it’s not an activity of the analyst. I’m not anti-hermeneutic in general, I’m anti-hermeneutic only insofar as people try to make analytic work a speciality of hermeneutics.

 

But the other point is that the only translator, the only hermeneut, is the human being. That is, the human being is always a translating, interpreting being. But what is he translating? That’s why I’m using the word “translate” and not “interpret.” Take for instance Heidegger’s hermeneutic position. He says there is a proto- or first understanding, which is the understanding of the human condition. But as I see it, there is no translation if there is not something already being put into words, not necessarily verbal words. So I would go back to the idea of a hermeneutics of the message, which was also the first meaning of hermeneutics. Because as you know hermeneutics in the past was a hermeneutics of the text. And especially of sacred texts, like the Bible and the Koran and so on. So I think that we have to go back to a hermeneutics of the message. Not a hermeneutics of the message of God, but a hermeneutics of the message of the other.

 

CC: So you’re saying that the modern notion of hermeneutics as a process of understanding has forgotten that hermeneutics originated as a reading and translation process.

 

JL: Yes, a translation process. Hermeneutics at the very beginning was a hermeneutics of something being addressed to you. And in Heidegger, what is interesting is that it became a hermeneutics of the human situation. But he forgot that the human situation in itself cannot be translated. It’s just facts, it’s just factual. In the framework of the hermeneutics of the human individual, what is important is to go back to the idea that the first interpretation is an interpretation, not of one’s own situation, but of the situation of receiving a message.

 

CC: If one can make an analogy with the original message from the mother, could one say that it is an address also?

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: Is it a matter, then, not simply of translating any message, but a message that is addressed to you?

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: So it’s specifically then–which makes it more complex–the translating of an address, which is different from, let’s say, the translating of a statement. Because an address takes a specific form.

 

JL: Yes. It’s always the translating of an address.

 

CC: And so something of the enigma and the resistance has to do with that structure of address?

 

JL: Yes.

 

CC: In this context, how does “translation” help us understand what you have called “psychic reality”? You have commented that psychic reality is the “reality of the message” (Seduction, Translation 75). In what way is translation a rethinking of the general problem of the relation between reality and the psyche?

 

JL: My problem is not the old epistemological, philosophical problem of the reality of the external world…. On this point, I must say, I’m very much an empiricist, or, even if you want, I’m colored a bit by phenomenology–in the sense that every consciousness is consciousness of something. Even animal consciousness is consciousness of something. And there is no problem for me of rebuilding the external world, starting from something internal. I think that any living being is so open to the Umwelt that there is no problem of rebuilding the reality of reference starting from representations. The problem of representation and reference for me is completely wiped out by phenomenology.

 

Now, my problem is not that. It’s not a problem of the other world, the other thing, which is taken care of by phenomenology, and it is also not an analytic problem. As I said before, it’s a very big error on the part of psychoanalysts to try to make a theory of knowledge starting from so-called psychoanalysis–for instance, starting from the breast and the reality of the breast. Or even Winnicott’s starting from the first not-me possession, and building the external world beginning with what he called the transitional object, and so on. The problem, on our human level, is that the other does not have to be reconstructed. The other is prior to the subject. The other on the sexual level is intruding the biological world. So you don’t have to construct it, it first comes to you, as an enigma.

 

CC: So it’s the opposite problem. Too much other!

 

JL: Yes, the opposite problem. Too much other, exactly! And instead of saying the first not-me possession, the problem for the human sexual being is to have a first-me possession. That is, to build an ego starting from too much otherness.

 

CC: So your interest is in how that takes place.

 

JL: Yes. What I say in The Copernican Revolution (La révolution copernicienne inachevée) is that we are first Copernican, that is, on the sexual level, which is invaded by the other’s messages, and the problem is to recover from that.

 

CC: Since trauma, at least later on, is connected with accidents, would you say that when the adult trauma interrupts like an accident, it is the reemergence of that too much other?

 

JL: Yes, absolutely. That too much other coming back. And there is a destruction of the ego. The ego cannot cope with it, or even is no longer there. So in that sense I agree with you. The otherness comes back full strength!

 

VI. The Practice of Psychoanalysis

 

CC: As a final question, I would like to ask you how you became interested in the problem of trauma in Freud, and if there is a link between your becoming interested in that and your philosophical training. Would you say your interest in trauma grew out of your philosophical training?

 

JL: Perhaps my questioning came from philosophy; I went to psychoanalysis as a philosopher. I would say my main question is about psychoanalytic practice: not about clinical work as such, but rather the question, what is the very invention of Freud in psychoanalytic practice? Is it just a kind of role-playing? Or is there something else more fundamental? For me the understanding of analysis as just reconstructing some events that have not been constructed correctly, or as role-playing–that is, you play the role of the mother or father, but you must say that you are not exactly as they were–never seemed very interesting to me philosophically. Nor did it get at the true invention of Freud. I felt that the analytic situation could not be understood just as reviving a factual situation, but as reviving the situation of being confronted with the enigma of the other. So at the heart of my inquiry is really the analytic situation, and the question of what we are doing in it, and whether or not it is just something that any other kind of psychotherapy could do, which I do not think to be the case.

 

CC: You are also now going back, in your work, to the question of time, which you appear to believe is a crucial element of Freud’s discovery. Is this also linked to your clinical inquiry?

 

JL: I think that there are at least two aspects of time in Freud, and I think he mixed them together. On the one hand, there is the question of time as the experience of the outside world, which is linked to perception and to what he calls the system of consciousness. But this, in my opinion, is the biological aspect of time. And that aspect of time is very limited; it is immediate time, immediate temporality. But what Freud tried to discover, through Nachträglichkeit, is something much more connected with the whole of a life. That is another type of temporality. It is the temporality of retranslating one’s own fate, of retranslating what’s coming to this fate from the message of the other. That’s a completely different aspect of temporality.

 

CC: And that’s what you’re exploring in your clinical practice.

 

JL: Yes. That’s what we’re exploring in the analytic situation. Freud stressed the fact that psychoanalysis was first of all a method. And I think he was right. Not a method in the sense of a scientific method, not an objective method, but the method of the cure. That is, the method of free association. In the frame of the address of the other, which remains enigmatic. That is something completely new in the experience of humanity, I believe. I think that’s a new era in humanity.

 

CC: Do you think it would be important for people to continue to explore this relation to the address of the other in the psychoanalytic situation in the context of the current work being done on trauma?

 

JL: Yes, I think that the analytic situation, and the analytic understanding of how the human being responds to the message of the other, can also be extended to the question of why, in some instances, there is no translation. I was very interested in psychosis, although I don’t have much experience with it anymore, but I think that psychosis can be understood as a negative of the seduction theory. A negative that says how the seduction theory doesn’t work. In the treatment of children, as well, it’s very important to understand that, before a certain point, interpreting has no meaning, if there is no unconscious yet. So the problem for the treatment of children would be to help to constitute an unconscious, rather than interpreting the unconscious as being there from all eternity.

 

CC: So hopefully psychoanalysis will be renewed through a different kind of understanding of the original insights of Freud that have been somewhat forgotten.

 

JL: Yes, but there is some strangeness in this seduction theory. For every one of us it is difficult to give an account of this strangeness, and to face it. Think of it in terms of grammar. In grammar, you say, the first person is the person who speaks. The second person is the person to whom I speak. The third person is the person of whom I speak. But who is the person who speaks to me?

 

CC: And that is what…

 

JL: And that is what we have yet to cope with.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (esp. 410-413); Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria; and Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria.”

 

2. See also Laplanche’s “Interpretation Between Determinsim and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem.”

 

3. See, for example, Jean Laplanche, “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other.” See also his “Seduction, Persecution and Revelation.”

 

4. As an extreme illustration, see the movie Crash by David Cronenberg [Jean Laplanche’s note].

 

5. See also Laplanche’s “Temporality and Translation: For a Return to the Question of the Philosophy of Time.”

Works Cited

 

• Freud, Sigmund. “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” 1896. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 189-221. 24 Vols.
• —-. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al0. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 3-64. 24 Vols.
• —. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Trans. and ed. J. M. Masson. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1985.
• —. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vols. 4-5. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 1-686. 24 Vols.
• —. “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.” 1910. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 59-138. 24 Vols.
• —. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” 1914. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 67-102. 24 Vols.
• —. The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1954.
• —. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess.
• —. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 7. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 125-245. 24 Vols.
• Freud, Sigmund and Josef Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. 1893-1895 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 1-311. 24 Vols.
• Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. Ed. John Fletcher. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• —. “Implantation, intromission.” La révolution copernicienne inachevée. Reprinted in Laplanche, Essays on Otherness.
• —. “Interpretation Between Determinsim and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73 (1992): 429-445.
• —. La révolution copernicienne inachevée: Trauvaux 1967-1992. Paris: Aubier, 1992.
• —. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. Translation of Vie et mort en psychanalyse. Paris: Flammarion, 1970.
• —. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. New York: Blackwell, 1989.
• —. “Notes on Afterwardsness.” Seduction, Translation, Drives. 217-227. Reprinted in Laplanche, Essays on Otherness.
• —. Problématiques I: l’angoisse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.
• —. Problématiques III: la sublimation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.
• —. “Psychoanalysis as Anti-Hermeneutics.” Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 7-12.
• —. “Seduction, Persecution and Revelation.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995): 663-682.
• —. Seduction, Translation, Drives. A Dossier Compiled by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992.
• —. “Temporality and Translation: For a Return to the Question of the Philosophy of Time.” Stanford Literature Review 6.2 (1989): 241-259.
• —. “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78 (1997): 655-666.
• —. “Traumatisme, traduction, transfert et autres trans(es).” La révolution copernicienne inachevée. 255-272.
• —. “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution.” Trans. Luke Thurston. Essays on Otherness. 52-83.
• Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973. Translation of Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1967.
• Masson, Jeffrey. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984.