Laplanche Interview 2015

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Psychoanalytic Review, 102(5), October 2015 © 2015 N.P.A.P.

Originally published as “Entretien avec Jean Laplanche,” Enfances et PSY ., 2002, no.

17, 9–16. Reprinted by permission.

Translated by Nicholas Ray. (Thanks to Jonathan House for helpful comments on the

translation.)

DANON AND LAURU

INTERVIEWWITH J. LAPLANCHE

INTERVIEW WITH JEAN LAPLANCHE

Conducted by Gisèle Danon and Didier Lauru

The starting point for this interview with Jean Laplanche is a ques-tion regarding the place of infantile sexuality within psychoanaly-sis today. Laplanche begins by underscoring the audaciousness ofFreud’s characterization of infantile sexuality and the significanceof the expansion of the field of “the sexual” that this characteriza-tion entails. He goes on to outline his celebrated “general theoryof seduction.” In doing so he explains key terms associated withit, such as the “enigmatic message” and the “fundamental an-

thropological situation,” and clarifies how the theory seeks to ac-count for sexuality in the expanded sense. In particular, Laplanchestresses the intersubjective origins of “drive” sexuality in infancy,its chaotic evolution, its unique economic mode of functioning,and its subsequent conflict with innate “instinctual” sexual im-pulses that surge forth at puberty. He also positions the generaltheory of seduction in relation to the important advances madeby attachment theory in the field of the adult–child relationship.Throughout the interview, the discussion touches on social con-

texts, and at points Laplanche outlines positions on topical con-cerns connected to education, media, and the law, and the impor-tance of rethinking certain psychoanalytic paradigms in an age ofnew family structures that do not correspond to the nuclear unit.

Interviewers: In clinical work we are often confronted with the sexual-ity of children and adolescents. One hundred years on from the ThreeEssays on the Theory of Sexuality , how are we to define the placeaccorded by psychoanalysts to the central question of infantile sexuality?

Laplanche: Freud’s great discovery is enlarged sexuality, which isto say the sexuality that is not first of all related to the differencebetween the sexes, male and female. It entails all the pleasures ofthe body, all the so-called erogenous pleasures, which eventuallybecome subject, among other things, to sublimation. It has noth-ing to do with the “sexed,” that is, sexual difference. When Freudspeaks of the latter he uses the term Geschlecht (meaning anatomi-cal, sexed difference). This is the distinction I have introduced by



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occasionally employing the term sexual [le sexual ],1 which refersto a polymorphousness, not a difference. What is at issue in the

Three Essays on Sexuality is not the sexed but the sexual or the sexual . Something of the Freudian discovery is thus recovered intranslation.

Even today the really trenchant aspect of this sexuality contin-ues to be obscured. Infantile sexuality is subject to repression ofa social or ideological order. And this repression has far-reachingeffects, since the social is not simply something exterior: It comesto control and circumscribe, psychically, this infantile sexuality

that is, by its nature, poorly circumscribed.In my view, all sexuality is both psychic and somatic. Of course,all infantile sexuality is linked to fantasy, which is to say that it ispsychic. But it is no less somatic, since fantasy is connected to thebody. I am not in favor of an idealism of sexuality. I have frequent-ly been accused of denying the biological dimension, but for methe biological and the psychic are one and the same.

We can also introduce this question by means of another dis-tinction: the distinction between drive [ pulsion] and instinct [in-

stinct]. The distinction is entirely clear in Freud, but it too hastended to be obscured. The drive has no preestablished aim, noris it genetically determined; it surges forth in the course of thechild’s existence, and from the very earliest days. The drive isnot adaptive—in contrast to instinct, which certainly is. This is thewhole problem: The drive is in need of structuring and circum-scription. One could go so far as to say that it is anti-adaptive andin constant need of binding, since it is by its nature unbound.

It is, however, bound to the other and to the environment, which raisesthe question of seduction . . .

Infantile sexuality comes from the other; it comes from theunconscious of the other. To come back to Freud, we know thathe abandoned the theory of seduction. In my view he threw “thebaby out with the bathwater,” so to speak. For we must in factreturn to the idea that there exists within infantile sexuality adimension that is irreducible to heredity and the genetic and isdeeply connected to the earliest adult–child relationship. I say

adult–child rather than mother–child because although it is gen-erally true that the child’s earliest relationship is a mother–childrelationship, it is not necessarily the case that a child is raised byits mother or even by a woman.



INTERVIEW WITH J. LAPLANCHE 711

This dimension, which I call the fundamental anthropological si-tuation exceeds the mother–child relationship. Original seduction

is, generally speaking, mother–child seduction, but is not neces-sarily so. In the relationship between the adult and the newborn,the infans, the little nonspeaking being, there exists a fundamen-tal asymmetry that derives from precisely the fact that the adultenters into the relation furnished with an unconscious whereasthe child’s unconscious is constituted within the relation itself.

Is this why you describe the situation as being enigmatic for the child? Yes, because the child has no response to it. He can respond on

the level of adaptation or self-preservation, on the level of attach-ment, but he has no response on the sexual level. The sexual un-conscious of the adult emerges within this relation—although in away that is mostly concealed—and this means that the message ofself-preservation itself, the message of affection, is compromisedby sexuality. The child has to reckon with something that is notwithin his biological makeup. In order to translate it he has tosearch for instruments of another kind. Something of the orderof the symptom or the “slip” comes to be grafted onto biological

foundations, which include attachment; for adult actions, owingto the presence of a fantasmatic dimension and to what may showthrough them, are always more than simple matters of care, of theeveryday. The adult’s sexuality thus causes static or interferencein the relation with the young child.

Do you think that this has consequences in terms of therapy? Not directly. However, I do think it essential to keep in mind the

asymmetry of the adult–child relation when it comes to thinkingabout the therapeutic situation. Therapeutic asymmetry, whichwas introduced by Freud’s creation of the analytic situation, is thetransposition and guarantor of the asymmetry of the adult–childrelationship. Freud’s genius was to invent the therapeutic situa-tion and analytic neutrality. He developed this profoundly asym-metrical situation at the same time as he developed the theory ofseduction. He then abandoned the theory that went hand in handwith the therapeutic situation. It is a very common consequenceof the analytic set up that the therapist may be the bearer of an

enigma, thus sustaining for the patient, within the therapeuticframework itself, the experience of the enigmatic.

The enigma itself is seduction, and is at the same time themainspring of understanding—the very mainspring of progress,



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one could say. The enigma is also the mainspring of time. It isonly on the basis of the enigma posed to him by the adult world

that the subject temporalizes himself, creates a family romance,creates a history for himself.

So, the enigma induces creativity, storytelling? Storytelling as one of the ways of responding to the enigma.

It will always be unequal to or insufficient for the enigma. Therewill always be a remainder. Fortunately, no narrative will ever bethe perfect one that would somehow resolve the enigma exactly.The essence of the enigma is that it always leaves a residue of

otherness—whether it be a repressed residue or what I call thetransference of the transference. At the termination of an analysiscertain analysands manage to retransfer this relation to the enig-ma into the external world. The opening to the enigma, whichwas reactivated by the analytic situation, can be recovered andtransposed anew, chiefly in the relationship to the cultural world.

This is what I call inspiration. In my view there is no creativitywithout this reactivated relation to the enigma of the other, with-out the questioning that the creative work never completely suc-

ceeds in fulfilling or comprehending. The creative person is hewho forever seeks to put an existence and a relation into a story,into narrativity—but none will ever be sufficient.

If the situation of seduction is so enigmatic for the child, do we notcome back to the parent, for whom there is also something enigmatic inthe care he gives the child?

Yes. The parent is the bearer of an enigma because he is enig-matic to himself. It is said that “the child is enigmatic to the adult,”but I say no. It isn’t quite like that; and what is more, I speak not ofenigmatic signifiers but rather of enigmatic messages. Now enig-matic messages are messages that, to begin with, come from onedirection only—from the adult side. Very quickly, a reciprocity willemerge, but it is the enigma of the adult that initiates the move-ment at the outset.

We must see infantile sexuality in all its radicality. I do notdeny the existence of an instinctual sexuality. Instinctual sexualitymakes its appearance at puberty. Biologically speaking, we know

that there is hormonal silence in the child from the first monthsthrough to the prepubescent stage, that during this period thereis a total absence of instinctual sexuality. It is in this void, in thishollow, amidst this silence of the instinct that the whole evolution




of the drives takes place, and it is a very chaotic evolution. I wouldnot describe infantile sexuality in terms of a smooth succession of

stages. It is far more chaotic than that.We know the importance of latency in terms of establishing the repres-

sion of infantile sexuality, and of the infantile more generally. Yet we are seeing children who are at the latency stage but seem to be less and less“latent”. . .

Yes. It would seem that we must not discount cultural develop-ments and the media coverage of a certain kind of sexuality thatis not necessarily infantile sexuality. Between the latter, very anar-

chic mode of sexuality—which is connected to fantasies—and thatwhich emerges at puberty there is undoubtedly a problematic re-lation, even a conflict. I have put this in a rather figurative way: Atthe moment the sexual instinct appears—the truly sexed instinct,one might say, which arrives at adolescence with the reappear-ance of the biologically innate—its seat is already occupied by in-fantile sexuality, a sexuality that is much less easily circumscribed.

The transformations of puberty, with the possibilities for genital ful- fillment that they enable—the “pubertal” as Philippe Gutton puts it—co-

mes to disrupt and challenge infantile sexuality . . .I would say rather that it is infantile sexuality that comes to

disrupt the pubertal, or at least that it takes up the whole field. . . This is because infantile sexuality does not function in thesame way as adult sexuality. It is not directed toward the object; itis caused by the unconscious object. It does not have an adaptiveobject or an object that is predetermined by instinct. On the con-trary, the object is what is at its source, rather than being that bywhich it is fulfilled. This sexuality is excited by the object. It func-tions on the model of excitation, in contrast to instinct—the sexualinstinct and all the instincts of self-preservation, which work ac-cording to the model of satisfaction.

These are entirely different economic modes of functioning:On one side there is the pursuit of excitation or total exhaustion;on the other side, the pursuit of the best possible equilibrium.Infantile sexuality is a factor of disequilibrium that eventuallycomes to be integrated into adult sexuality in the form of prelimi-

nary pleasures, sublimations, and so on. At the beginning, how-ever, there is a contradiction between the aims and the economicregime of infantile sexuality on the one hand and those of adultsexuality on the other.



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Here we touch on the current debate around the question of sexualabuse, so well illustrated by Ferenczi’s pioneering article [1933]. The

damage that it causes among children, adolescents, and, later on, inadults, is clear to see. Do you think it involves a kind of reactivation ofthe infantile?

Yes, and here too lies the whole question of the incest prohibi-tion. It is said that the incest prohibition is placed on the childagainst sleeping with its parents, but it is in fact something placedon the parents themselves. Freud says that the little Oedipus is pro-hibited from sleeping with his mother. But it is, rather, the mother

or father who must be prohibited from sleeping with the child.I believe that there is a massive reactivation of infantile sexualitywithin those who commit sexual abuse. The predominance of anal-ity within sexual abuse cases is something else about which we donot speak. Anality remains the great repression of our age, fromevery perspective. We refer to it in veiled language, and yet . . .

In another respect there is a risk of “abuse” within the presen-tation of this debate, a risk of treating every affective adult–childrelation as though it were abusive. Within this relation there is

something sexual—one cannot deny it without regarding the rela-tion as being wholly aseptic. One sees this in American schools,and even now in France I think. A teacher can only be in a roomwith a child if the door is left open. It becomes completely absurd.Whether or not you want it to be, the sexual is present within therelation. Obviously, the adult needs to be in control of his sexual-ity. But to deny that it exists, or to translate into a criminal actevery adult gesture of affection toward a child, even of faint seduc-tion, seems to me to be an absurdity. There may be a problem,but placing it in the hands of the legislature may not necessarilybe the best way of dealing with it.

This is a problem for all childcare professionals. Would what you describe as an absurdity constitute a modality of supplementary repression?

One could almost say “over-repression.” Within every humanbeing there is, of necessity, a repression of infantile sexuality. Theessential aspect of infantile sexuality within the adult is that it isrepressed and that it can reemerge—for example, in the course

of an analysis. But from saying this to saying that not only is itrepressed but it must be socially suppressed. . . It’s a difficult ques-tion, to be sure. But, does it need to be left in the hands of publicopinion and the legislature?




You know, those who cry out loudest against criminals are cry-ing out first and foremost against the criminal within themselves.

We should perhaps acknowledge (and here I shall be still moreshocking) that among the parents who march in protest againstabusers—such as those recently witnessed in Belgium2—there mayhave been a number of individuals whom this excited in a moreor less unconscious way: their own incestuous drives finding a de-rivative satisfaction by being projected onto certain scapegoats soas not to be seen within the individuals themselves.

It must be said that at present it is the media that determines

the punishment, and one can see the panic among police, the judiciary, and in schools, the moment anything happens. Yet thismedia coverage clearly affects the public in a certain manner, oth-erwise they wouldn’t buy it! Incest and sexual abuse sell well inthe media.

Do you think that the media and legislation might have an impact onthe theories of infantile sexuality?

We are in a period of such great transformation! I don’t thinkpsychoanalysis has to run off in search of some kind of prophy-

lactic measure or to issue any rules. Matters are too complex andtoo much in motion. Before issuing rules, psychoanalysis woulddo better to try to look more closely at what is actually happening.I am thinking of questions such as that of homosexual couples.For example, when a male homosexual couple adopts a child atbirth some say they have the right to do so, others say they do not.Some say that such an adoption is “against nature”; others say,“There’s still a structure in place; there’s still a triangulation. . . .”But who speaks about the sexual? The sexual between two men,which is still not the sexed and which is, for the most part, anal.No one talks about these things. Who asks what primal scene thechild will imagine? It is completely obscured; the very question Iam posing is taboo. If there were a television show about a homo-sexual couple in which someone said, “Does your child imagineyou having anal sex?” it would be censored! You can see the extentto which infantile sexuality is still taboo. And it will remain so.

How will the child’s fantasies be constructed?

We still don’t know. We don’t yet have the children of homo-sexual couples on the couch. Perhaps you already do in your ther-apeutic work?



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More often the children of female couples who have adopted. There’salso the question of what the child receives from these new couples, from

couples in general, and how the child integrates what he receives into the processes by which his ego is constituted and into his sexuality.

This immediately poses the problem of the primal scene. Howis it fantasized by children in family contexts such as this? Withoutbeing prescriptive, without saying that there is a good and a badprimal scene, I think these are questions that psychoanalysts andpsychologists should be asking themselves.

If, rather than there being a kind of biological sexuality that

would then have to be structured, one thinks that the very originof sexuality is the relation to the adult, then the pertinent ques-tion is not to know how the structuring comes about but howsexuality comes to emerge in the first place. How does sexual-ity emerge from the relation with the adult, and not necessarilythe mother? It is not necessarily the world of the mother that isat issue; this is a sort of ideal schema that we keep in mind, theschema of the natural family, as it were. Children are increasinglyplaced in relationship to adults where these relationships are not

“natural.” And even in the relation with the mother the erog-enous aspect of the relation—as in breastfeeding —was for a longtime completely obscured.

Is it not therefore necessary to observe the baby and the interactionswith its mother, including the fantasmatic dimension of this interaction?

I am not in favor of the idea that the “psychoanalytic baby” ismerely a reconstruction. I don’t think that the reconstruction thattakes place in the analysis of adults and of children who are oldenough simply comes out of nothing. Furthermore, observationof the baby is insufficient in itself, for it supposes that the babycan be observed, with his sexual drives and his instincts alone.In my opinion, observation of the baby, if it is to be truly ana-lytic—and this is no easy thing, of course—must take account of theparental unconscious, since the parental fantasies play an essen-tial role in this evolution. I’m not suggesting that parents shouldbe systematically subjected to analysis, only that it is necessary totake account of parental fantasy.

How do you integrate attachment theory? The theory of attachment is a great step forward—provided that

it does not exist in isolation. It practically brought to an end Mar-garet Mahler’s theory, which psychologists had lived and breathed




for fifty years. According to her theory, a symbiosis exists at thebeginning and has to come undone. We know now that in the be-

ginning there is a dialogue, a communication between adult andbaby. This is quite extraordinary, for we used to live and breathethe idea of symbiosis, the symbiotic phase and separation–in-dividuation. All these elements are also found at the origin inFreud’s theory of primary narcissism, which has been criticizedon the same grounds.

Since the advent of attachment theory and the work of T. Ber-ry Brazelton and of Daniel Stern, a number of researchers have

shown that the idea of the baby who is first of all closed in uponitself, or closed within the mother–child dyad, and who must—somehow—individuate, is a myth. In this respect attachment the-ory has come to fill a gap left open by Freud in terms of what hecalled the drives of self-preservation. We recognize that self-pres-ervation in the human infant is much more complex than simpleself-preservative, elementary, physiological mechanisms such asthe maintenance of homeostasis and so on. From the very outset,self-preservation—if we are to retain this term—requires exchanges

with the adult.This, then, is the positive aspect of attachment theory. The

downside is that we cannot see beyond it. Attachment theoryprevents us from seeing the sexual, it prevents us from seeing(for this requires finer observation) how the dialogue that im-mediately develops between mother and child is from the outsetparasitized by the maternal unconscious. Within this dialogue,which is essentially self-preservative, there arises something thatderives from one side only and with which the child has to reckon.I sometimes use the image of a carrier wave, which in radio ismodulated: You have a carrier wave, which would be attachment,in all its reciprocity, but something causes interference on thiscarrier wave (like “noise” in the sense of communications theory)and this is, precisely, the infantile maternal unconscious. I say “in-fantile” specifically, because within this relation it is the infantileunconscious that is awakened in the adult.

Awakened in consequence of the baby and of the adult?

There is a veritable regression in the adult in the presence ofthe baby. There is a kind of basic communication, but the essenceof the theory of seduction is the observation that upon this ba-sis of interaction there supervenes something that at the begin-



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ning comes from one direction only, from the unconscious of theadult, and that will very quickly find itself being treated by the

infant because he needs to treat it. Something unilateral or asym-metrical is thus grafted on to something that is bilateral.

This very asymmetry is, in my view, the ultimate origin of theotherness by which human beings are ceaselessly confronted (pas-sively) and that they must contend with (actively), in the certaintythat doing so will never resolve the enigma.

The fundamental anthropological situation is the matrix of all thesubsequent situations in which, for better or worse, it is the other,

in his irreducible strangeness, who interpellates me.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

1. Here Laplanche’s French text deploys the neologism “le sexual ” ratherthan using the standard French “le sexuel .” This neologism, introducedin the last decade or so of Laplanche’s work, is intended to stress lin-guistically the German component adjective “Sexual -” used by Freud (asin Sexualtrieb = sexual drive, Sexualtheorie = sexual theory), and thereforeseeks to register the distinctiveness of Freud’s “expanded” theory of sex-uality, from the Three Essays onward, in contrast to the everyday notionof genital sexuality (le sexuel ). Since the German term “Sexual-” coincideswith the standard English spelling of the term “sexual,” I have chosento mark its presence with italics, as has been the practice elsewhere, forexample, in Laplanche (2003), which contains his most extensive discus-sion of this neologism.—Trans.

2. Laplanche is alluding to public reaction to the “Dutroux affair” inBelgium in 1996, which saw mass protests on the streets of Brussels.—Trans.

REFERENCES

FERENCZI, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. In Fi-nal contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (E. Mosbacheret al., trans.; ch. 13). London: Karnac, 1994.

LAPLANCHE, J. (2003). Gender, sex and the Sexual . In Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006 (J. Fletcher, J. House, & N. Ray, trans.). New York: Inter-national Psychoanalytic Books, 2011.

The Psychoanalytic Review

Vol. 102, No. 5, October 2015

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Laplanche Interview 2015