Article

INTERPRETING (WITH) FREUD1

Jean Laplanche
University of Paris, (VII)
Correspondence: Professor Jean Laplanche, 55 rue de Varenne, Paris, France

A b s t ra c t
This essay presents an explicit outline of almost everything that has implicitly governed Laplanches methodological purpose over the last 30 odd years. Of particular interest in the essay are the following: a critique of Jung and Ricoeur, together with a clear exposition of what impels Laplanches emphatically anti-hermeneutic approach to Freud; the suggestion of points of continuity between Laplanches early collaborative publications (with Leclaire and Pontalis) and his subsequent solo work; an account of the singularity of Freuds analytic method and its implications for a textual analysis of Freud; the broaching of the notion of the exigency (exigence) of Freuds thought, and its relation to desire.

Ke y wo rds
Freud; hermeneutics; psychoanalytic method; Ricoeur Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2006) 11, 171184. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100077

I n terpr et i ng wi th Freud

nterpreting: the word is familiar enough, and the function to which it refers secular or, more readily, sacred may seem well-established. Throughout the ages, and in all domains of culture, signs, oracles, writings have been interpreted. Interpretation always plays on the ambiguity or polysemy, as it is known, of a texts manifest element: whether it is the message delivered by a naturally appearing phenomenon or pronounced in a deliberately false statement, or whether, ultimately, in the Bible or the Koran, it entirely overflows by its very richness the text offered to an immediate reading.

c Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 2006, 11, (171184) 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1088-0763/06 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs

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Feeding off the ambiguity of the given, interpretation reduplicates this ambiguous nature within itself: in the course of a negotiation to which I lend my services as mediator I may declare my impartiality by reminding you that I am only the interpreter of the wishes of your adversary B. But when I give to B an account of this interview, the latter, worried by what I might have advanced in his name, suddenly becomes indignant: Youve given your own interpretation of what I meant!. Translating, but also deviating from, supplementing and re-inflecting, however imperceptibly, the manifest and immediate meaning these are processes with which we are also familiar in the context of psychopathology: paranoiac interpretation. Systematic, and armed with a vision of the world which is doubtless no more than the counterpart to and transposition of the precarious and menaced, but so much more rigid unity of his ego, the paranoiac presents us with a kind of compendium of all the processes of hermeneutics: the interpretation of signs and gestures, of absences and presences; of texts also, sacred and secular, which, directly or indirectly, are always addressed to him. He does this with an exactitude and a rigour that Freud heavily underscored.2 The paranoiac, certainly, takes up everything in his personal discourse, but always by following the lines of virtual force, of unconscious meanings that are only sketched in outline, and which he underlines mercilessly. As understood by all non-Freudian hermeneutics cabalistic or paranoiac, ancient or patristic to interpret is to place oneself beyond the given, and, from that point, to aim at back at this side. A procedure which is meant to be allied to a branch of knowledge [savoir], and which would not hesitate to compare itself with a scientific procedure. But here the given comes already freighted with meaning, it is a word to be deciphered, a book that is at once to be read, translated, and replaced with a more truthful and authentic text. Hence, Foucaults statement with respect to Renaissance hermeneutics: There can be no commentary unless, below the language one is reading and deciphering, there runs the sovereignty of an original Text (Foucault, 1970, p 41). As something supposed to guarantee the authenticity of the interpretative undertaking, this two-level structure of manifest and latent text is given a rough ride by modern critics. The manifest text be it gesture, everyday speech, even a body of work is considered to be a natural phenomenon open to potentially infinite meanings. There is no root in Racine;3 and the classical critic who claims to be able restore the true Racine to us can only be a forger or, at best, a naf. On the other hand, if it is granted that a work may have meant something specific to its author, that meaning need interest us no more than any other interpretative variant or variation, except, at most, as psychological or anecdotal background. To interpret and to read are parts of the same process: that of taking up a work into ones private universe, reanimating it with ones own breath, like the great interpreter does with the dead score he procures from Durand.4
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Deutung interpretation: Without wishing to lapse into the hermeneutic mysticism which, licensed by an appeal to Germanic depth, accepts as scientific discourse what is only etymological or philological exegesis, let us note that the German term bears slightly different resonances from the French. Deutung is more realist: it supposes the existence of a meaning which is to be recovered, and not created. It serves not only to clarify and shed light on a text, but to show it in its true light, to speak the truth, to find the immanent meaning: Bedeutung. For Freud, to interpret is to go from a manifest text to the latent text on which it is founded; it is to traverse backwards along the paths which have led to the production of a phenomenon. The obscure presentiment of the meaning, the intuition, can be at most only a precursor to this labour of decryption.5 The originality of Freudian interpretation truly merits being recalled and underlined, for it is too often misunderstood, both in the context of theory where certain efforts have been made to confine it within the general frame of a hermeneutics, and in practice where even the most orthodox analysts do not always resist the seductions of reading as from an open book. Our book, our text, could be the neurotic symptom, a subjects actions or discourse, the text of a clinical observation, or the narration of a dream. Let us take the last as an exemplar. In the case of dreams we are faced with a given which bears a certain meaning and claims to be sufficient unto itself signifier and signified: we tell our dreams, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in fear; their poetics is universally recognized. A dream, then, is a text which we can read and which we even believe we can summarize, pass on second hand, and so forth. It is often said Freud sometimes said it himself that psychoanalysis discovered the existence of a hidden meaning in dreams. And finding support in that quickly assimilated notion of overdetermination, one adds that there exists a plurality of possible meanings which are perhaps equally legitimate, each according to its relative level of depth. But on the basis of this type of formulation alone one fails to see clearly what would distinguish Freuds position from the current tendency to deny the idea that there exists a single legitimate interpretation for every meaningful production. And it is not uncommon for psychoanalysts themselves to be complicit in this kind of reduction of their theory and their practice. Slip into a meeting where one of them is setting out to his colleagues a clinical case. Lending your ear to the discussion, you will easily pick up on who is the wisest and most reserved of the auditors: he will, no doubt with circumspection, venture to propose a profounder and more complete interpretation of the material that has been set forth, making use of context, of the part played by the associations reported by the speaker, and so on. But the wilder, and not always the younger among them, will go as far as to translate in a single breath and as from an open book, even those dreams which have been related in passing and without any contextual commentary. It is worth adding that this wilder analyst could be
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the speaker himself; for he is not necessarily privileged in his position as expositor, and nothing can justify the implication that this or that manifest fragment is the bearer of an unconscious meaning so evident that he or his auditors could arrive at it themselves without labour.6 So what is it that characterizes psychoanalytic interpretation? It is not just the certainty that there exist at least two texts in the behaviours with which it is confronted one which the subject gives or gives himself in the immediacy of his consciousness, and another text, a sort of unconscious discourse called the fantasy of desire. It is the method necessary for passing from the one to the other. We characterize this method as analysis; but in a sense that is both hyperbolic and deviant with regard to what the Cartesian spirit understands by it. The rules of method presupposed a breaking down of the object into natural and simple parts which fit neatly together. Thus, the procedure of reconstruction and synthesis was self-evident once the object had been conveniently cut along its lines of cleavage. In psychoanalytic technique things happen quite differently. The two rules of dialogue that of free association for the analysand and equal floating attention for the analyst form a methodological whole. The main part of the emphasis is placed on the precept of treating all elements of the discourse equally. All the details of a dream, for instance, must be taken, without any being privileged, as the possible point of departure for an associative chain. But the term element itself must not delude us here: in a dream there are no partes extra partes7 subject to simple delimitation; the elements are not atoms of meaning or even distinctive atoms in the sense used by linguistic theory vis a vis articulated discourse. What we call ` an element of the narration, strictly speaking, is anything of the narration: as much a detail as a scene or the whole ensemble of a dream. No relation of subordination exists between the part and the whole: the part can be as significant as the whole, and the whole can assume significance as one element among others. What Freud called a displacement of psychical intensity or a transvaluation of all psychical values in dreams is nothing other than the theoretical justification of the rule that units of meaning be segmented along all imaginable lines of division, along the apparently less natural borders that might exist. Scandalous though it be for modesty and the moral sense, the rule of omitting nothing in the course of the session and of treating every thought in the same way is as much of a shock to the understanding as it is to the ego. Only the cross-checkings and validations required by the treatment constrain us to accept the paradoxes and the paralogisms that it brings about. The impression the dream produces on me (sadness, terrory) or the judgements I make of it, which I believe to be perfectly innocent these things belong to the elements of the dream, but without anything conferring a privileged value upon them. The dream was blurred [flou], or I can remember no more from this point on: such phrases can put us on the track not of the character of the dream, but of one latent thought among others that of my friend X who likes to wear
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loose-fitting [flou] clothes, or of my having forgotten something while awake prior to the dream. Conversely, the small, scarcely perceptible absurdity of a detail can, like an algebraic exponent, mark the entire formula of the dream with a sign of negation or derision. Thus again, the narration can be of significance to the content, the signifier to the signified, and vice versa. And thus is the reality of the metaphor fleshed out: the memory of this person that I have in mind really is the object that I have placed within me and incorporated, whether propitious or destructive. To interpret in psychoanalysis is first of all to radically dismantle and lay out flat the organization of the manifest text. From there on it is to follow, without loosing ones footing, the associative chains that form a seemingly disorganized and monstrous network, lacking any proportion or correspondence to the chain to which it is appended. And if the outline of a latent content does begin to become legible, it does not do so as a translation, in the common sense of the term, of the manifest material, nor as a transformation even with the complexity of an anamorphic transformation which would still entail a point-to-point correspondence between manifest and latent text. To interpret is to cling to every thread of the discourse without letting go, moving step by step, but motivated by the single certainty that the innumerable interlacings of the tracks left by the hunter-game will eventually be revealed to plot out the signifying knots which punctuate a certain unconscious sequence.8 And even if it is sometimes necessary to attempt to put this sequence into words, it still scarcely constitutes interpretation. Indeed, in a late article Freud elected to introduce the new term construction so as to reserve interpretation for this progression from the singular to the singular which constitutes the essence of the psychoanalytic approach: Interpretation applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a construction when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotteny (Freud, 1937, p 261). A procedure which is close to interpretation but already distinct from it, construction would be a process of linking up in the sequence of the fantasy a certain number of the signifying elements to which the originating desire is attached. Freud was the target of constant criticism for failing to deliver this reconstruction, this synthesis, to patients shaken by the analysis in their very reasons for existence. In this connection the enemy, Jung and the Zurich school, conduct on a double front one and the same attack. Sometimes, more openly they demand that the analyst replace what his reductive interpretation has destroyed, by proposing to the neurotic new ethical and religious ideals (an attempt to edify: a pious reconstruction). At other times, more insidiously, they present their religious exhortation as interpretation, if not as the one true interpretation. The so-called anagogic line claims to overturn Freudian interpretation in the very act of restoring to it its true meaning,
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simultaneously reviving the theological tradition which requires the ascension from the literal to the spiritual meaning of sacred texts.9 Thus, the fantasmatic structures discovered by Freudian analysis themselves become symbols to be deciphered: The Oedipus complex has a merely symbolic meaning: the mother in it means the unattainable, which must be renounced in the interests of civilization; the father who is killed in the Oedipus myth is the inner father, from whom one must set oneself free in order to become independent (Freud, 1914, p 62). It need hardly be emphasized that this claim to overturn the Freudian perspective cheapens all that is properly revolutionary and scientific in the psychoanalytic method, in favour of a return to the mystical decipherment of the Treatise of Signatures.10 Without wanting to discuss the efficacy of Jungian therapy (why, and for whom?), let us note that the mode of interpretation on which it claims to be based consists ultimately in channelling the desire of the subject, in placing his discourse within another that of the doctor of the soul.

Interp reting Freud?

Reading Interpreting. In between these two terms a theoretical debate is taking place about what the press calls the return to Freud. The terms are themselves subject to interpretation, howevery For there are those who think that their Reading of Freud warrants the use of the capital letter to consecrate their reading as Unique and Prophetic. And there are others who want to maintain the possibility of keeping separate the act of reading of Freud and the act of interpreting Freud, excluding from their own methodology what can be learned from Freud about either one.11 And theres the rub: it is not a matter of the non-analysts right to read Freud, to explain or to interpret him;12 it is a question of assessing what one calls reading and what one calls interpretation. As to reading, Michel Tort has formulated the decisive objection: isnt every reading of a great author necessarily an interpretation? The real problem at stake in reading is absolutely not how to banish all interpretation, but how to construct an interpretation which is rigorously consistent with the text (Tort, 1966, p 1462). And Tort shows that a reading which claims to be only a reading, a faithful expose, a pedagogically aimed substitute for the text itself, would also be an interpretation, but by default. Let us bring to this debate two things drawn from Freud: an instance of what he does and another of what he says. Of what he does, for he himself happens to beya reader of Freud, a synthetic expositor of his thought, whether in the form of dogmatic presentations, or historical accounts of the evolution of his thought. However, fascinating such texts can in many respects be, they certainly carry their share of responsibility for the debasement and banalization of the doctrine, for the effacement and the distortion of its true history. Freud is not, however, one of those authors who
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live by exploiting their past work. The care which he puts into writing his Short Account of Psychoanalysis is a testament to this, even in the final years of his life. But by its very nature this kind of systematic and synthetic development, intended to give a faithful reflection of the work and nothing but, opens the field to intellectual mechanisms situated at another, more superficial level than those at work in the original discovery and its initial exposition. The concept of secondary revision which Freud forged apropos of dreams is eminently applicable in many other domains. This consideration of intelligibility aims to render acceptable from the point of view of moral demands, logics, and even the aesthetics of waking thought, a content in which is expressed, though in an already distorted form, something of the vivacity and uncontrollability of unconscious desire. It operates in an exemplary way fashioning and imposing a scenario, like a plating, upon the dream; but it is more or less legible in all forms of conscious production. There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions. The construction of systems is seen most strikingly in delusional disorders (in paranoia), where it dominates the symptomatic picture; but its occurrence in other forms of neuro-psychosis must not be overlooked. In all these cases it can be shown that a rearrangement of the psychical material has been made with a fresh aim in view; and the rearrangement may often have to be a drastic one if the outcome is to be made to appear intelligible from the point of view of the system (Freud, 191213, p 93). To read and to give an exposition of Freud would, according to Ricoeur, be to give an architectonic reconstitution of the work, to produceya homologue, in the strict sense of a vicarious object which presents the same arrangement as the work (Ricoeur, 1974, p 162). But if the most direct effects of secondary revision are revealed in the more manifest elements of which a work consists, in the concern for intelligibility or for common sense, in the presentation and architectonic arrangement of a work, then how could a pure reading of Freud (supposing it were possible) achieve anything but the reinforcement of the effects of filtering, censorship and sealing-off egoic, even superegoic effects already begun in the inevitable reading of Freud by Freud? From reading to interpretation we pass with Ricoeur from one extreme to the other: from pure and impossible objectivity to that relocation in a different discourse for which the author demands if not the rights of individual subjectivity, at least those of a kind of philosophical subjectivity: I am not saying that a single philosophy is capable of furnishing the vehicle [structure
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daccueil] in which relations between force and meaning can be explained. I believe that the correct reading of Freud is possible, while only a correct philosophical interpretation is possible. The one I propose is connected with reflective philosophyy (Ricoeur, 1974, p 169).13 The frankness with which Ricoeur defines his interpretation as extrinsic, as the appropriation of a body of thought, or again as a reflexive relocation should not, however, exempt it from having to answer the following question: in this conception of interpretation, what becomes of the Freudian discovery of interpretation? For either what Freud called Deutung for which he claimed to supply an original, scientific method founded and confirmed by patiently and rigorously conducted experience is just a new avatar of the eternal hermeneutic, or else we should like to know why nothing of this Freudian method is, if not directly usable, then at least transposable when it comes to the interpretation of Freud. And it would not be enough to object to such a transposition on the grounds that this would entail a confusion of domains or levels: the interpretation of the human subject on the one hand, and the interpretation of Freudian thought on the other. For if we understand Ricoeur rightly, it is the same kind of teleology which carries along both the subject and Freudianism in a succession of figures, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it (Ricoeur, 1974, p 174). In the absence of any response, it would have to be concluded that what Ricoeur returns to with his specific method is precisely what Freud always challenged, and against which he struggled during the split with Jung: the old hermeneutics of religious inspiration, the reception of the subject within a teleology which is presented to him as the highest and truest form of his conflicts. With the Zurich school, anagogic interpretation finds itself facing a dilemma: to acknowledge itself as a form of pious indoctrination, or to present itself under the mask of psychoanalytic interpretation. In Ricoeur, hermeneutics is openly declared to be the relocation of one discourse in the contingent alterity of another discourse (an interpretation), retaining nothing of the aims of the Freudian approach (unconscious wishes reduced to their most fundamental and truest shape (Freud, 1900, p 620)), nor of the rigorous means that it gives itself in order to achieve those aims.14

I nt e rp r e t i ng ( w i t h ) Fre u d
If we call our approach to the Freudian text psychoanalytic and interpretative, it is not in the sense that Ernest Jones conceives of it in his biography of Freud inspired, it should be noted, by indications given by Freud himself. The schema that Freud (1913) sometimes proposes for the psychoanalytic study of a body of thought, a psychography of artists and philosophers etc., should not be considered the last word of psychoanalysis on the issue. Caught between the reduction of a body of thought to purely subjective conditions deriving from the contingency of an individual history, and the
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simply rational critique of that body of thought, Freud only ever finds a deft compromise: psychoanalysis, he tells us, can indicate the weak points of this or that theory, but it is up to rational critique, internal critique, to demonstrate the weaknesses detected by another discipline. Applied to philosophers, applied by Jones to Freud himself, this method seems to forget one of the essential points of the Freudian discovery: the neurotic in his symptom, and all the more so the thinker, even in certain deviations in his reasoning, must be right in some way. A psychoanalytic psychography which took this maxim with consistent seriousness would not open onto the purely contingent or purely aberrant, but onto a desire of which the figures and the reasons sketch a fragment of a more general combinatory repertoire.15 The fact remains, however, that a psychoanalysis of a thinker and of his work always comes up against this objection in principle: that we find ourselves outside of the treatment, the major condition for the application of the method. And even if one wanted to try it regardless (e.g., as Freud did for President Schreber), it must be conceded that, in the case of Freud, the biographical elements we have at our disposal are incredibly incomplete, shockingly fragmented and censored (and, first of all, by the author himself). The weight of these objections is considerable, but it only really obtains in the case against the project for a psychoanalytic psychography of Freud. The undertaking of which we are here sketching certain conditions of possibility, is different: transposing mutatis mutandis the Freudian method of analysis of the individual and his desire onto the exigencies of a body of thought, or to what, on the level of discourse, is most closely related to desire. Just as we have given only fragmentary indications as to the method of psychoanalytic interpretation in the treatment, here too we can only limit ourselves to some points of method. Conducted in the consulting room of the psychoanalyst, the dismantling of thought and expression the placing of insignificant details onto an equal level with ceaselessly reaffirmed declarations of principle, and of the part with the whole etc. constitutes a salutary methodological rule in that it takes the secondary revisions and camouflages of reason from the rear, thus enabling other networks of meaning to emerge. This rule, which could also be called the principle of egalitarian analysis, amounts to a renewed respect for literalness. The literalness of reasoning must obviously not be neglected, but must be compared with and counterbalanced by the literalness of the notion. A work conducted by J.-B. Pontalis and myself (1973) enabled us to show how much the dismemberment of a body thought, far from reducing it to just a pile of rubble, could foreground the rigour of the Freudian procedure in regard to the creation and use of concepts. Traversing the oeuvre in every direction, with nothing omitted and nothing privileged a priori this is perhaps for us the equivalent of the fundamental rule of the treatment. Once this fundamental rule is posed and applied, numerous
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mechanisms or processes of the unconscious discovered in the psychoanalytic interpretation of neurosis or of the dream, can be refound at the level of Freuds work. The absurdity of a detail, as we have seen, can mark the whole of a dream with the symbol of negation. In the history of Freudian thought this unconscious process is met with on more than one occasion. Thus in 1895, when Freud introduces the concepts of bound energy and free energy which will go on to become fundamental in the doctrine, he claims to be doing nothing other than adopting the opposition introduced by Breuer between two sorts of cerebral energy: tonic or quiescent energy and mobile energy. But three points here are striking: (1) Freud thinks it useful to employ terms other than Breuers; (2) the terms that he does use are in fact drawn from the physics of Helmholz where they have a quite precise usage with which Freud and Breuer themselves are familiar; (3) the Freudian usage of these terms is aberrant and even absurd with regard to that of Helmholz, since Freuds free energy corresponds largely to Helmholzs bound energy and vice versa. For us, all of this signals that there is a displacement to be acknowledged, an inversion to be redressed: what Freud unconsciously intends thus to mark with the sign of critique is Breuers theory with which, explicitly, he will always make out to be in agreement.16 Forgetting, in the sense of repression: we find here a solid example with Freudian theory of the genesis of sexuality or of the drive [pulsion]; for, having described so distinctively in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality the birth of sexuality from every kind of human activity (a birth punctuated by the terms autoerotism, leaning on [etayage], polymorphous perversity etc.), Freud finishes up in his theory of the id apparently placing the drive back in the order of nature and biology. The psychoanalyst, faced with such a massive forgetting, and one which has been perpetuated among Freuds successors, cannot shrink from the task of interpretation. For him, this forgetting is only the offshoot, the intellectual avatar, of a fundamental repression: that by which the drive, denied its infantile and intersubjective origins, ends up being assimilated to the subject, manifesting itself as a second nature, and resulting, after various complex and accidental detours, in a quasi-instinctual regulation of the sexual activity of the individual. Equivalences or permutations of signifier and signified, of object and expression, the apparent confusion of the plane of reality and causality with the plane of metaphor all of this is to be straightened out, to be analysed, to be interpreted. Thus, if Freud tells us that the ego is not merely a surface entity but is itself the projection of a surface (Freud, 1923, p 26),17 there is no use in denouncing the crude confusion between, on the one hand, the spatial model of the psychic apparatus on whose surface the ego would be situated, and, on the other, the real process of projection (in the geometric and neurological senses) which would come to be added to the model on the basis of what seems to be overtly naive reasoning. It must be understood that there exist complex
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relations, dense networks of connection between the metaphors consciously advanced by Freud, the unconscious metaphors that the interpretation of his thought allows us to recover, and those sorts of realized metaphors (such as identifications) which psychoanalysis discovered to be constitutive of the human being. It can be seen how interpretation of this kind should take its distance from the manifest text, and how wary it should be of everything in the doctrine which constitutes its egoic reworking. Is this to say that this methodical and critical usage of the unfolding of the signifying elements of the work implies the definitive rejection of all perspective, historical or architectonic? Forgive me for making only a mention of this complex problem here. In an interpretative approach inspired by the Freudian discovery, perhaps the notion of history (the history of a body of thought) should be relocated to another level: that of a historic (in the same way that one passes from problem to the problematic). Far from being simpler than history, far from being the plane that could ideally give an account of the passage from one state of system to another state of system (Ricoeur, 1974, p 164165), this historic would be more complex, because it would unfold on several levels simultaneously. But in order to pose its principles it would be proper first to examine the multiple functions of contradiction and to situate in its role and its principal significance the repetitive agency [instance] of desire. The architectonic? This term too strongly implies the ideas of system, of good order, of harmony, for the analyst not to consider it with some suspicion. He is likely to prefer the term structure a term of which, beyond its now fashionable currency, Jean Pouillon (1966) has recently given a particularly persuasive definition. Freudian psychoanalysis brings to this definition a quite peculiar stress that is linked to its method: structure should not be assimilated to form or to system, since these notably imply a balance between parts whose comparative weights can be evaluated according to the quasi-volumetric importance that they have in the whole. It has been seen that one of the results of Freudian interpretation is the depreciation in considerations of order, of subordination of part to whole etc., in showing, for example, how at the level of the unconscious a minute detail of the manifest system can act as a counterbalance to considerable energetic masses. Structure in Freud (which is to say at once in his work and in his object), is a binary or ternary equilibrium between elements which over a period of time can find themselves entirely displaced, invested with a totally different function while retaining the very same name, and apparently the same nature, in the manifest work. To take just one example: it is impossible to recover the meaning of the pleasure principle, beyond Freuds sometimes clumsy formulations, without taking into account the structural upheavals, the almost kaleidoscopic shifts of investment which lead to this apparent paradox: the pleasure principle, situated at the beginning of the Freudian oeuvre on the side of the sexual drive, is, at a certain moment, annexed
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to the death drive, finally to be refound as the regulatory principle of Eros that constructive and generative force of synthesis quite different at the end of the Freudian oeuvre from what was described in 1905 as sexuality.18 A structural history of Freudian thought is perhaps possible, provided that it takes Freudian thought fully into account in its very method. It lays down as its preliminary condition that one stay close to the work as well as to its impasses accepting fully the need for a reductive analysis. Can it be reproached for arriving at relatively fixed views insofar as it leads to the demonstration, across the mutations of the theory, of a permanent exigency [exigence], the permanence of a discovery which has perhaps yet to find its adequate scientific form?

About the Author

Jean Laplanche is Professor Emeritus of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (VII), and a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France. Among his best known major works are The Language of Psychoanalysis (co-authored with J.B. Pontalis) and Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. His most recent major works to be translated into English are Essays on Otherness and The Unconscious and the Id. Professor Laplanche is also scientific director of the ongoing project to translate Freuds Oeuvres Completes. `

Notes
1 Translated from La revolution copernicienne inachevee: travaux 19651992, Paris: Aubier, 1992, pp 2136 by Vincent Ladmiral and Nicholas Ray. (With thanks to John Fletcher of the University of Warwick for his invaluable comments on the translation). 2 [The jealous paranoiac] was extraordinarily observant of all these manifestations of [his wifes] unconscious and always knew how to interpret them correctly, so that he really was always in the right about it, and could furthermore call in analysis to justify his jealousy. His abnormality finally reduced itself to this, that he watched his wifes unconscious mind much more closely and then regarded it as far more important than anyone else would have thought of doing (Freud, 1922, p 226) 3 Il ny a pas de Racinede Racine. The full import of this phrase depends upon an untranslatable pun on Racines name: racine root. Thus the formulation implies (a) that the body of work signed by Racine is not considered to be rooted in its author, but necessarily destined to be integrated into the private universes of innumerable future readers, and (b) that by the same token it would be naive to treat Racine the historical personage as the root or interpretative key to understanding his textual corpus. Translators note. 4 The recording onto disc or film of a musical or theatrical work does not alter the objection in principle: in the name of what absolute should we privilege the performance of Sacre du Printemps conducted in person by Stravinski? [Durand is the name of a major music publisher in France. Translators note]. 5 Cf. the beginning of the chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) which focuses on the method of interpretation and situates psychoanalytic practice in relation to ancient and popular procedures for the interpretations of dreams. 6 No analyst, including Freud himself, has been able to resist this species of interpretation. In the moment of enthusiasm for the dawning psychoanalytic discovery, in the wonderment of seeing interconnections between interpretations made in the psychoanalytic treatment of individuals and
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those made in the analysis of myths and folklore, Freud gives substance and authority to a theory of symbolism which claims to identify a universal unconscious language one of symbols which would be marked neither by the history of the individual nor even by the particularities of a given civilization. With what is called symbolic interpretation, Freud actually comes upon a second method, one parallel to that which requires the patient labour of working through individual associations. Yet on reflection, symbolism (taken in the precise sense of a symbolic) perhaps comes down to a single truly universal symbol: the minimal and detachable element of meaning, the little object (das Kleine), the phallus in its innumerable guises. 7 Parts without partsFTranslators note. 8 Cf. Laplanche and Leclaire (1999), in particular Serge Leclaires analysis of the unicorn dream. 9 The theological notion of anagogic interpretation was reprised by Herbert Silberer in 1914, to the admiration of Jung. Silberers anagogic interpretation aims to establish the universal ethical significance of the products of symbolism, such as dreams. He therefore opposes it to analytic interpretation which supposedly reduces products of symbolism to their specific and usually infantile-sexual content. See Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p 34). Translators note. 10 The Treatise of Signatures forms one portion of the physician Oswald Crolls Basilica Chymica (1609). The ancient doctrine of signatures held that all natural things on earth were signed by God. As a chemist, Croll sought to decipher the signatures thought to be imprinted within natural objects, in order to determine their specific healing properties as well as their relation to the divine. Translators note. 11 The debate concerning Paul Ricoeurs work Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970) can be followed in Tort (1966) and Ricoeur (1974). 12 Must it be that the intimidation carried out by certain analysts, the blackmail made by appeal to incommunicable experience, to territory, and the private hunting ground of the treatment, have become so prevalent that the philosopher, forgetting his sovereign approach (homo sumy), has first to steel himself in order to face them, by responding that, after all, it is Freud who came onto our territory (Ricoeur, 1974, p 163)? (And he was made man, and he dwelt among usy) 13 Such terms give away their vintage. There was talk in 1967 of welcome centres [structures daccueil] for future orphans of the UNR. But didnt Freud build a permanent structure lest anyone should think it necessary to propose one (or several) centres of prefabricated accommodation for some unfortunate Freudians, cold and wandering? [Note added 1992]. The UNR acted as a political party, the dissolution of which caused something of a stir at the time. 14 As a means of illuminating the dialectical teleology which would allow such a relocation of Freudianism, the reference to Hegel is far from being unequivocal. The best and most convincing Hegelian analyses are those in which the new figure, the interpretation, is imposed through an over-insistent, attentive and passionate dwelling on the literalness of the preceding figure. Seen from this down to earth perspective of the labour of reading, there is in Hegel something of a prefiguration of the reductive interpretation of Freud. 15 Cf. what I have attempted in Laplanche (1961). 16 Cf. the analysis of the distinction between free and bound forms of energy in Laplanche (1976, chapter six, esp. pp 119 ff.). Translators note. 17 Cf. the more detailed exploration of this passage in Laplanche (1976, pp 134138). Translators note. 18 On the relationship between sexuality, the death drive and the theoretical evolution of Eros, see Laplanche (2004).

Re fe r e n c es
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications Ltd. (Orig. Les Mots et les choses, 1966). Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press [S.E.], vol. IVIV.
Interpreting (with) Freud

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Freud, S. (191213). Totem and Taboo, in S.E. vol. XIII, p. 93. Freud, S. (1913). The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest, in S.E. vol. XIII. Freud, S. (1914). On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, in S.E. vol. XIV. Freud, S. (1922). Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality, in S.E. vol. XVIII. Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and The Id, in S.E. vol. XIX. Freud, S. (1937). Constructions in Analysis, in S.E. vol. XXIII. Laplanche, J. (1961). Holderlin et la question du pere. Paris: Presses Universitaires de ` France. Laplanche, J. (1976). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Orig. Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 1970). Laplanche, J. and Leclaire, S. (1999). The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study in The Unconscious and the Id: A Volume of Laplanches Problematiques, trans. Luke Thurston with Lindsay Watson, London: Rebus Press 1999, pp. 224272. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psychoanalysis (Orig. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 1967). Laplanche (2004). The So called Death Drive: A Sexual Drive, trans. Luke Thurston. British Journal of Psychotherapy 20 (4), summer 2004 (Orig. La soi-distant pulsion de mort: une pulsion sexuelle. Adolescence, no. 30, 1995.). Pouillon, J. (1966). Presentation: un essai de definition. Les Temps modernes 22 (246), pp. 767790. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, (Orig. De linterpretation: essai sur Freud, 1966). Ricoeur, P. (1974). A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud, trans. Willis Domigo. In Don Ihde (ed.) The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Orig. Une interpretation philosophique de Freud in Le Conflit des interpretations: essays dhermeneutique, 1969). Tort, M. (1966). De linterpretation, ou la machine hermeneutique. Les Temps modernes 21 (237), pp. 14611493, and 21 (238), pp. 16291652.

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