British Journal of Psychotherapy 33, 1 (2017) 105–124 doi: 10.1111/bjp.

12265

JEAN LAPLANCHE: THE UNCONSCIOUS,

T H E I D A N D T H E OT H E R

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

KEY WORDS: THE UNCONSCIOUS, THE ID, THE OTHER, SEDUCTION,

TRANSLATION, THE DRIVE

Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) was one of the most original and important of post-
Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers. He was the Scientific Director of the editorial and
translation team responsible for the new translation of Freud’s works, the Gesam-
melte Werke, from German into French, in the first multi-volume Oeuvres Comple`tes,
which has now one final volume to complete. With Jean-Bertrand Pontalis he com-
piled the great theoretical dictionary The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967), essen-
tial for any serious study of psychoanalytic theory. He has pioneered a remarkable
‘return to Freud’ that has implemented a systematic critical archaeology of the Freud-
ian conceptual field over a 50-year period, and which has mapped both its transforma-
tions and the contradictory forces that shape it. He has also initiated a collective
project – under the heading of ‘New Foundations for Psychoanalysis’ – that seeks to
revise classical Freudian metapsychology in the light of a return to Freud’s origins. In
particular, he sought to transform Freud’s officially abandoned regional theory of
traumatic seduction (restricted to cases of actual sexual abuse and psychopathology,
which is where psychoanalysis began) into what he has called a general theory of

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106 John Fletcher
primal seduction (the fundamental situation of all human infants in their relation to
the adult world).
As part of his translation work and the composition of the dictionary with Pontalis,
Laplanche’s development of a critical archaeology, with its attention to both the
genetic and structural dimensions of the Freudian field, has led to a distinctive and
illuminating way of interpreting both its emergence and the successive reconfigura-
tions and repetitions that have shaped the field.1
As is well known, Freud affiliated psychoanalysis with the Copernican Revolution
as a paradigm of scientific rationality. This he described as the first of a series of
blows to human narcissism delivered by science, conceived of as a series of decen-
trings of the human subject. The first, Freud proposes, is in relation to the cosmos,
delivered by Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system in which the earth
and the planets moved around the sun. This challenged the hitherto dominant geocen-
tric model in which the earth was the centre of a system around which the sun and the
planets moved, perfected in the ‘great synthesis’ of Ptolemy of Alexandria in the sec-
ond century AD. As a second decentring, Freud added the Darwinian model of evolu-
tion, which decentred the human subject in relation to the whole system of animal
species, and the natural history of their emergences and disappearances, challenging
the religious cosmogonies that had placed ‘Man’ as a separate creation and as the
apex and governor of the natural world. Finally, as the third of the world-historic
blows to human narcissism, Freud modestly places his own psychoanalytic revolu-
tion, which delivered the third psychological blow, decentring the human subject in
relation to himself: Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the drives (in his expo-
sition significantly he pairs both terms together): ‘The ego is no longer master in its
own house’ (Freud, 1917, p. 143).
Laplanche has further developed Freud’s analogy of the Copernican and psychoana-
lytic revolutions as a critical tool for reading Freud himself, offering us the paradoxical
proposition: ‘if Freud is his own Copernicus, he is also his own Ptolemy . . . With Freud,
one should speak, at almost every period, of an alternation between relapses into Ptole-
maism and resurgences of the Copernican, other-centered vision’ (Laplanche, 1992a,
p. 60). Throughout his essay, ‘The unfinished Copernican Revolution’, Laplanche
traces Freud’s continual alternation between, on the one hand, concepts and arguments
that pose a radical decentring of the subject in relation to a primal other – which, in a
letter to Wilhelm Fliess (6 December 1896), Freud had called ‘the prehistoric, unforget-
table other person who is never equaled by anyone later’ (Masson, 1985, p. 213); and,
on the other hand, a continually resurgent movement of Ptolemaic recentring back on
the individual, as the origin and centre of his own endogenous development. Laplanche
demonstrates that concepts such as the ego, narcissism, the unconscious, the drive
(Freud’s Trieb and not Instinkt) are marked by distinct and competing conceptualiza-
tions, in which an original decentring ‘Copernican’ break is covered over by a recen-
tring ‘Ptolemaic’ revision, a revision that initiates a certain fourvoiement or ‘going-
astray’ of the concept along structurally determined lines.
In this paper I want to consider some of the key elements of Laplanche’s interven-
tions within those decentring and recentring, Copernican and Ptolemaic movements

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 107
that structure and restructure Freudian thought, and to trace some of the specific con-
ceptual transformations that have produced Laplanche’s ‘New Foundations for
Psychoanalysis’.

THE TRAUMATIC UNCONSCIOUS

The formulation of Freud’s that captures the permanent effects on the human subject
of just such a ‘prehistoric, unforgettable other person’ (Masson, 1985, p. 213) belongs
of course to Freud’s early seduction theory from the years 1896 and following.
Freud’s shifting conceptions of the unconscious and its status begin first of all here,
as a correlate of the model of traumatic seduction, defined in economic terms as an
excess or surplus of excitation and affect produced by a sexually perverse adult on an
undefended recipient, an infantile recipient who has as yet no developed sexual
organization and no unconscious. The unassimilable nature of these surcharged
impressions provokes a defensive expulsion from consciousness, a splitting off of
what Freud called a separate ‘second psychical group’ (Freud, 1894, p. 49). This
unassimilated ‘pathogenic nucleus’ (Freud, 1895, p. 289) is reactivated in later
moments that rhyme with the earlier one in a temporal process that Freud called
Nachtr€ aglichkeit (literally, from the German, ‘carrying-after-ness’, which Strachey
translates as ‘deferred action’, and for which Laplanche suggests an alternative trans-
lation – ‘afterwardsness’; Laplanche, 1992c, pp. 260–5). These highly charged,
unprocessed deposits, when reactivated, provoke repression and symptom formation
in a second moment, whereas the primary moment had been asymptomatic. This
‘traumatic unconscious’ is thus located as the by-product of the asymmetrical
exchange between seducer and seduced. It is clear that here Freud is operating with a
conception of the unconscious as pathological, temporary and clinically reducible.
Once its traumatic contents are brought to consciousness, memory will then be
restored, abreaction will take place, the unconscious liquidated. It is only in Freud’s
encounter with the non-pathological and universal phenomenon of the dream in his
major opus of 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams, that he acknowledges and begins
to theorize an unconscious that is permanent, irreducible and insistent, but one
encountered only in those epistemologically unreliable derivatives, the formations of
the unconscious – the dream, the joke, the symptom, the screen memory, etc.

FROM A RESTRICTED TO A GENERAL THEORY: THE QUESTION OF

SEDUCTION
Laplanche’s argument is that, while Freud first encountered the unconscious in an
extreme pathological form and only later came to recognize it as a universal dimen-
sion of the mind, he failed to move beyond the restricted theory of seduction as literal
sexual abuse of the child by the perverse adult, and as the necessary precondition for
the production of neurotic symptoms. Laplanche elaborates a theory of what he calls
primal seduction as ‘the fundamental anthropological situation of the human being’
(Laplanche, 2002, p. 99): that is, the infant’s encounter with the adult world, its radi-
cal dependency on the nurturing adult with an organized sexuality and an

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108 John Fletcher
unconscious, both of which the infant lacks. Within this general theory of primal
seduction the unconscious is given a specific status, which is neither temporary,
reducible and pathological, on the one hand, nor on the other, primal, always already
there, the seat and source of the instincts for self-preservation and the survival needs
of the organism, with which the repressed sexual unconscious is, unhappily, conflated
in Freud’s late theory of the id in the second topography. This conflation will be ana-
lysed in the final sections of this paper.
Freud officially but only temporarily abandoned his model of traumatic seduction
in the letter to Fliess of 21 September 1896, continually oscillating through the rest of
the 1890s between a further development of his seduction theory and the first inklings
of what was soon to become a theory of infantile sexuality. He turned from a
restricted focus on psychopathology to the beginnings of a developmental model of
sexuality in general and of the psychical apparatus. Laplanche argues that there were
important gains in this move to a general theory: essentially, an understanding of
infantile sexuality and its pre-genital component drives, and indeed the very concep-
tion of the Trieb or drive itself with its various vicissitudes, as distinct from the
instinctual self-preservative functions. However, he suggests that there were also cer-
tain crucial losses in this move to a general theory modelled on the successive stages
of biological development. In particular, these losses were:

1. the primacy and impact of the nurturing adult other;

2. the traumatic temporality of afterwardsness (Nachtr€ aglichkeit);
3. the understanding of the unconscious system as a secondary formation created
by repression (which, while affirmed in the 1915 metapsychological papers, is
put at risk and confused with the formulation of the id);
4. the briefly glimpsed conception of what Laplanche calls ‘the translational model
of repression’ and by implication, I would add, of sublimation as a process
twinned with repression.

Laplanche proposes a key element that lacks a systematic theoretical articulation

in both Freud’s restricted and general theories – something that is transmitted from
the adult to the infant and translated; that is, both incorporated and repressed by the
latter. This he calls the enigmatic signifier or message, something that is exciting, agi-
tating and, on the side of the adult, unconscious and sexual. To do him justice, Freud
had given, in the third of the Three Essays (1905), following his description of a spon-
taneous endogenous infantile sexuality in the second essay, a brief but vivid descrip-
tion of maternal seduction in the third essay, the implications of which are never
articulated systematically in his metapsychology:
A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an
unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic
zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all,
is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived
from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 109
clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object. A mother
would probably be horrified if she were aware that all her marks of affection
were rousing her child’s sexual instinct [Trieb – JF] and preparing for its
later intensity . . . She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love.
(Freud, 1905, p. 223)
For Laplanche and, briefly, in this passage for Freud, seduction is ordinary, non-
abusive, and involves the transmission of an excitation and affect by the seductive
adult that awakens a response in the recipient leading to the formation of the sexual
drives as such, as a by-product (Nebenprodukt) of parental care and affection. Lap-
lanche’s concept of the ‘enigmatic signifier’ is anticipated by his colleague and friend
Didier Anzieu in his work on the skin-ego, and the primordial binding function of the
skin-surface: ‘Mothers are aware of these pleasures of the skin experienced by the
infant . . . and they intentionally induce them through caresses and games. The infant
receives these maternal gestures first as excitation, then as communication. The mas-
sage becomes a message’ (Anzieu, 1970, p. 29). The carriers of this affect, Freud’s
‘marks of affection’, Anzieu’s massage-become-a-message, are the ordinary gestures
of nurture and childcare that meet the infant’s needs but in doing so convey some-
thing else. They are enigmatic, not just because the recipient doesn’t have a code to
translate what is coming to him from the adult, but because, Laplanche argues, they
are compromised by the adult’s unconscious. They are parapraxes, that is,
compromise-formations, like slips of the tongue or bungled actions. A signifying
intention at the conscious level – to feed or comfort the infant – goes awry, is thrown
off course by sudden intensities, unsuccessful inhibitions, fragments of fantasy that
come from somewhere else; in particular, Laplanche suggests, they come from the
repressed infantile sexuality of the adult. He writes:
given that the child lives on in the adult, an adult faced with a child is
particularly likely to be deviant and inclined to perform bungled or symbolic
actions because he is involved in a relation with his other self, with the other
he once was. The child in front of him brings out the child within him.
(Laplanche, 1987, p. 103)

PRIMAL SEDUCTION, TRANSLATION AND THE REPRESSED UNCONSCIOUS

It is in the context of this understanding of primal seduction that Laplanche locates
one of Freud’s versions of the unconscious as a separate psychical system. This
unconscious system is characterized by its own forms of primary process functioning,
the processes of displacement, condensation, the pressure towards discharge, formal
regression from the properly linguistic, logical and semiotic characteristics of lan-
guage and the secondary processes, manifested in the dream-work as analysed in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In particular, it is the unconscious as a psychical
place, a site within a psychical topography that is created by repression. Laplanche
has taken Freud’s description of maternal seduction and the awakening of the drives
in the Three Essays and placed it centre stage. He has moved it from its marginal

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110 John Fletcher
place in a text that is overwhelmingly ‘Ptolemaic’, i.e. that conceives the drive-based
development of infantile sexuality as an entirely endogenous process passing though
fixed developmental stages, and he placed that development in direct relation to the
intrusive, exciting ministrations of the nurturing adult. In order to specify and to con-
ceptualize the nature of the exchanges between adult and infant, Laplanche also
brings together two radical insights that remain on the margins of Freud’s theoretical
development, and he elaborates them so as to give an account of the psychical proc-
esses involved in the reception of the adult’s enigmatic messages.
These two Freudian marginalia are:

1. from Freud’s theoretical workshop, in one of his richest and most produc-
tive letters to Fliess (6 December 1896), the positioning of repression in
relation to the idea of translation, translation as a central psychical process
in the formation of what Freud called the seelische Apparat or apparatus
of the soul; and
2. Freud’s brief account of a primal repression that is the necessary precondition
for ordinary or secondary repression, ‘repression proper’ (Freud, 1915a, p. 148)
from the 1915 metapsychological papers, ‘Repression’ and ‘The unconscious’
(Freud, 1915a 1915b).

Laplanche attempts to elaborate Freud’s momentary articulation of the concepts of

repression and translation, which significantly occurs in the same letter, previously
quoted, that described the ‘prehistoric, unequaled’ other of seduction. There Freud
had located the function of translation at the threshold between different phases of
psychic development (of which puberty is only the most obvious). Here its task is to
translate, to reinscribe in terms of the new phase of development, highly charged psy-
chic material, described as perceptual signs, memory traces that had been registered
by the subject in an earlier moment. So something is translated, carried across the
threshold, where, Freud tells us, ‘Every later transcription inhibits its predecessor and
drains the excitatory process from it’ (Masson, 1985, p. 208, emphasis added). It
becomes clear that we are dealing not just with perceptions, and so with a purely per-
ceptual or cognitive psychology, but with perceptions, memory traces that are
charged with libidinal excitation and that require an inhibiting and draining of the
excitations they carry.
Freud doesn’t explore any further the future vicissitudes or outcomes of the suc-
cessful binding translation, although I would suggest that we have here the seeds of
the conception of anti-cathexis or counter-investment that Freud is later to propose as
‘the sole mechanism of primal repression’ (Freud, 1915b, p. 181), as well as of its
under-theorized, twin concept of sublimation. However, he does pursue the possibil-
ity that ‘this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material, which
has certain consequences’; and it is from this absence of translation that ‘I explain the
peculiarities of the psychoneuroses’. Then in a striking move Freud positions his
recently formulated concept of repression in relation to the same process of
translation:

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 111
A failure of translation – this is what is known clinically as ‘repression’. The
motive for it is always the release of the unpleasure that would be generated
by a translation; it is as though this unpleasure provokes a disturbance of
thought that does not permit the work of translation. (Masson, 1985, p. 208)
Laplanche then develops this process of translation and non-translation/repression
in two connections:

1. as a description of the infant recipient’s activity in the situation of primal seduc-

tion; and
2. as a description of the anti-cathexis of primal repression that creates the space of
the unconscious.

In the first connection, that of the active infant recipient of the enigmatic parental
transmission, he suggests that the perceptual signs inscribed in a first moment are not
just the generality of perceptual data that bombard the infant. They are rather signs
that are specifically addressed to, that target and so summon and interpellate the
infant: Freud’s seductive ‘marks of affection’, Anzieu’s ‘massage’ that inscribes a
stimulating but enigmatic ‘message’, tactile signifiers that are implanted in the primi-
tive skin-ego, provocative excitations from the other that awaken and begin to map
and to zone the skin-ego’s erogeneity.
Something of these exciting, agitating implantations the recipient will assimilate in
a later moment, through binding, calming substitutions and translations – the whole
fantasmatic field, Laplanche suggests, of Freud’s ‘infantile sexual theories’, signify-
ing sequences of the child’s own making. Crucially, however, a part of the primal
parental signifiers is defensively refused translation. It drops out of the translation
process on the pain of unpleasure, so to speak. Laplanche generalizes Freud’s notion
of the untranslated to suggest that for every act of translation (literally, of ‘carrying
across’, from the Latin transferre-translatum), there is always a remainder. Some-
thing is too hot to handle, something either refuses or is refused translation,2 some-
thing drops out and is remaindered.

PRIMAL REPRESSION AND THE DRIVES

In the second connection in which the notion of translation/non-translation is devel-
oped, Laplanche turns to Freud’s account of an originary, founding moment in his
sketch of a first primal repression. Freud had in 1915 proposed that the ‘psychical rep-
resentative’ of the Trieb or drive is ‘refused entry into the conscious. With this a fixa-
tion is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then
onwards and the instinct [Trieb] remains attached to it’ (Freud, 1915a, p. 148).3 This
is not just the secondary repression of an already constituted drive, which simply
wells up from within from the depths of our instinctual – self-preservative – function-
ing. Rather, primal repression through its processes of exclusion, in refusing entry to
consciousness permanently fixates a given perceptual element to an excitation; in
effect, Laplanche argues, primal repression thereby creates the drive as such: ‘the

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112 John Fletcher
representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct
[Trieb] remains attached to it’ (ibid.). In doing so, it lays down the primal repressed,
the primal untranslated that is refused entry into consciousness, as the first founding
elements of the unconscious system.
The drive and the primal unconscious are then in a recto-verso relation to each
other. It is the anti-cathexis of a substitute or second perceptual presentation (Vorstel-
lung) that excludes and fixates the primary perceptual presentation. Freud describes
the latter not as a mimetic representation of the drive, but as a representative or dele-
gate (Vorstellungrepr€ asentanz) of the drive. We have here, in the 1915 paper on
repression, the same process of translation/non-translation, sketched in the earlier let-
ter to Fliess, by which the exclusion-permanent-fixation-creation of the drive is pro-
duced. Eleven years later and in another part of the forest, Freud returns to the
question of primal repression to suggest: ‘the immediate precipitating causes of pri-
mal repressions are quantitative factors such as an excessive force of excitation and
the breaking through of the protective shield against stimuli’ (Freud, 1926, p. 94).
The old economic model of trauma is invoked again here by Freud to explain primal
translation-repression as a defence against something excessive coming from the out-
side: ‘the protective shield exists only in regard to external stimuli’ (ibid.). These,
Laplanche proposes, are the compromised messages, seductive and agitating,
addressed to the infant from the adult other, and impacting on and penetrating the
primitive skin-ego, a skin-ego that functions as both a protective envelope and a
receptive surface.
Laplanche calls these excluded-fixated representatives of the drive the source-
objects of the drive. He created this portmanteau word from two terms taken from
Freud’s theory of the drive. For Freud the drive springs from a bodily source, as a ris-
ing level of somatic tension demanding mental representation and action, action
directed towards satisfaction of a need and reduction of tension, obtained through an
object that is external. By contrast, for Laplanche the combined source-object of the
drive is an external object that has become an internal source of the drive. An object
that had a signifying force coming from the other is metabolized, partly translated
and incorporated by the nascent ego into itself, but also partly fragmented and decon-
textualized by the ego’s refusal of translation to some of its component elements. The
untranslated remainder acts as an exciting internal foreign body; Laplanche calls it a
splinter in the skin of the ego as it is anchored in the erotogenic zones that are the sites
but not, as with Freud, the sources of the drive.
In opposition to the Lacanian axiom that the unconscious is structured like a lan-
guage, Laplanche also calls these fundamental elements at the core of the uncon-
scious system, de-signified signifiers, in order to stress that in the passage to the
unconscious both signifying and referential functions are lost.4 A word, an acoustic
signifier drawn into the unconscious network, ceases to perform its ordinary semiotic
function as a sign. Freud had argued in the classic paper on ‘The unconscious’
(1915b) that the unconscious consisted of thing presentations (Sachvorstelllungen),
i.e. presentations of the thing or perceptual object, cut off from word presentations
that belong to the secondary processes in the preconscious. Laplanche counters that,

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 113
as they act in the unconscious, they are not presentations of the thing, the perceptual
object, but presentation-things, ‘thingified presentations’; reified, congealed, they
are, Laplanche says, ‘fixed, frozen, beyond any meaning that may inhabit them . . .
beyond all referentiality’. Consequently they have, he remarks somewhat cryptically,
‘both the generative power of schemas and the materiality of quasi-things’ (Lap-
lanche, 1984, p. 120). By the first formulation, ‘the generative power of schemas’, I
take it, Laplanche is thinking of what Freud called, referring to the resistance that
comes from the unconscious Vorbild, ‘the attraction exerted by the unconscious pro-
totypes upon the repressed drive process’ (Freud, 1926, p. 159) and hence their gener-
ative capacity to replicate themselves and their internal configurations, virus-like, in
the fantasy life and behaviour of the subject. The second characteristic, ‘the material-
ity of quasi-things’ – ‘hard as iron or harder’, Laplanche says (Laplanche, 1984,
p. 120) – insists on their resistance as a psychical thing or repressed unconscious
object to the assimilating, translating processes of the ego. This is ‘das andere Psychi-
sche’ (Freud, 1923a, p. 251), a phrase of Freud’s Laplanche is fond of citing, the other
psychical thing, with which Freud introduces that problematic entity, the id.

THE ID: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

This impersonal pronoun seems particularly well suited for expressing the
main characteristic of this province of the mind – the fact of its being alien
to the ego. (Freud, 1933, p. 72)
The German phrase das andere Psychische is used by Freud to introduce a new term
that initiates the second topography, and to describe the psychical reality that term
designates:
I propose to take it [Groddeck’s discovery] into account by calling the entity
that starts out from the system Pcpt. [the Perception-Consciousness system –
JF] and begins by being Pcs. [i.e. belonging to the Preconscious system – JF]
the ‘ego’, and by following Groddeck in calling the other part of the mind,
into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were Ucs.
[part of the system of the Unconscious – JF], the ‘id’. (Freud, 1923b, p. 23)
Freud’s highly condensed sentence introduces two key terms of the new topography,
the ego and the id, in terms of the first topography, the trilogy of the Preconscious, the
Unconscious and the Perception-Consciousness systems. The italicized abbreviations
insist that these are not just qualities or attributes of mental processes, but separate
mental systems, distinguished by their different relations to consciousness and their
different modes of functioning.5 Like the strategy of the whole book, Freud’s sen-
tence begins with the ‘higher’ agency of the ego, its origin in the perceptual system
and location in the Preconscious and proceeds to the third term, hitherto the dynamic
Unconscious forcibly excluded from the Perception-Consciousness system and the
Preconscious. We are told both that paradoxically the ego extends into the Uncon-
scious and that the id is, in what sounds in the English translation like merely a resi-
due, the remainder of the mind that is not the ego: ‘the other part of the mind’. The

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114 John Fletcher
realization that the ego’s defence mechanisms are unconscious, i.e. that it ‘extends’
into that system, is the anomaly that has called into question the adequacy of the pres-
ence or absence of consciousness as a criterion for differentiating mental systems,
and so prompted Freud’s project of formulating the second topography. Strachey’s
colourless, even banal phrase, ‘the other part of the mind’, over which the reading eye
all too easily glides, translates Freud’s German formulation: ‘das andere Psychische’;
a phrase whose nuances require some unpacking.
It anticipates rhetorically the final phrase of the sentence and climax of the
paragraph, which announces the first (albeit borrowed) neologism of the new topogra-
phy: ‘das Es’ (literally, the It). Both the descriptive phrase and the name take the
singular neuter pronoun ‘das’ rather than the masculine form ‘der’, or the feminine
‘die’. The neutral grammatical gender of das Es (in French, lacking a neuter, it is mas-
culine, le ça) reinforces the impersonality of ‘it’ when raised to the status of the
substantive with the dignity of its capital: ‘the It’, as in English it isn’t. Freud’s earlier
descriptive phrase also takes both the neuter pronoun and substantivizes the adjective
by according it the capital: ‘das andere Psychische’, the other psychical thing (I must
leave it to native speakers to decide what further nuance of meaning, if any,
distinguishes it from ‘das psychische Andere’).
The phrasing and grammar of both name and description relate back to the brief the-
matic statement that is the only rationale Freud gives for appropriating Groddeck’s
term: ‘I am speaking of Georg Groddeck, who is never tired of insisting that what we
call the ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are
“lived” by unknown and uncontrollable forces’ (Freud, 1923b, p. 23). The extremity of
Groddeck’s statement as summarized by Freud certainly lays the emphasis on the
impersonality of the unknown and uncontrollable forces in question, their alienness vis-
a-vis the ego. This is in striking contrast to the apparent anthropomorphism of the other
agencies of the second topography: the superego ‘who’ punishes the ego ‘who’ identi-
fies with the ego-ideal (an anthropomorphism that Laplanche suggests exists first at the
level of the lived experience of those identificatory processes that form the agencies,
before it becomes a theoretical feature of the second topography). Freud’s very next
sentence, however, suggests a critical distance from Groddeck in that ‘our impressions’
of the ego’s ‘essential passivity’ may not have ‘overwhelmed us to the exclusion of all
others’ (p. 23), as Freud’s ego, however beleaguered in its dependent relations with its
three masters, is far from essentially passive. With this simultaneous appropriation of
Groddeck’s key term and hinted reservation about his usage of it, his name and theory
disappear entirely in the 1923 text, nor is his distinctive conception of the id discussed
elsewhere by Freud.6
So is the id simply Freud’s somewhat opportunistic way out of the embarrassment
of an inadequate labelling of the central agency that distinguishes psychoanalysis
from other psychologies: the Unconscious as a mental system characterized by the
primary processes as opposed to the Preconscious characterized by the secondary
processes? The systematic Unconscious is renamed the id and business continues as
usual. Certainly very little is said about the id as such, despite the famous diagram.
The id is referenced only in relation to the other agencies (if it can even be considered

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 115
an agency in the same sense) and to the two classes of Life and Death ‘Instincts’.
Indeed the book that introduces the id might more appropriately have been titled The
Ego, the Superego and the Instincts, given the amount of attention devoted to them
and their complexities by comparison with the id. While ‘The Unconscious’ is an
entire metapsychological paper in seven sections with three appendices, along with a
supplementary paper, ‘Repression’, all the id gets is the paragraph discussed above
plus a few concluding sentences in the 1923 text and a somewhat stronger few pages
10 years later in Lecture XXXI, ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’.

THE ID AND THE DRIVES

Freud opens his few pages on the id in the latter lecture, with the statement: ‘You will
not expect me to have much to tell you that is new about the id apart from its new
name’ (Freud, 1933, p. 73), and significantly the latter is largely a recapitulation of
section V, ‘The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs.’ from the 1915 metapsy-
chological paper ‘The unconscious’. Indeed the starting point of both descriptions is
the affirmation: ‘The nucleus of the Ucs. consists of instinctual representatives which
seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses’ (1915b,
p. 186); ‘Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge – that, in our view, is all there is in
the id’ (1933, p. 74). However, by 1933 the theory of the drives, their identity and
inter-relations, indeed the very definition of the drive as such, had changed and the
notion of ‘instinctual cathexes seeking discharge’ functions now in a different con-
text. Laplanche diagnoses a set of what he calls ‘exigencies’ or ‘requirements’ at
work in the recasting of the system Ucs. as the id. These include a reference to biol-
ogy and to vital life-forces, central to Groddeck’s vitalist metaphysics; a genetic con-
cern with origins, with what is foundational and primordial; a renewed insistence on
impersonal forces, in Groddeck’s phrase, ‘that live us’, a paradoxical insistence on
heteronomy and the dethroning or decentring of the conscious, autonomous subject,
at the very moment in the 1920s, when the further development of the theory of the
ego threatened a turn to the rationality, even autonomy of the reality-testing, adapta-
tional ego of later ego-psychology (Laplanche, 1981, pp. 163–5).
In his concluding paragraph in 1923 Freud describes the ‘instinctual’ contents of the
id: ‘it has no unified will. Eros and the death instinct struggle within it’ (1923b, p. 59). It
is clear that the id of 1923 has been introduced, not just in acknowledgement of the
ego’s unconscious defence mechanisms with their characteristics shared with the
repressed, but also in the immediate wake of the reorganization of drive theory in 1920.
In the first theory of the drives of 1905, Freud had sought to locate the sexual component
drive in the first moment of its awakening as a ‘fringe benefit (Lustnebengewinn) derived
from the operation of the instincts of self-preservation’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967,
p. 31), and to articulate that connection through the notion of Anlehnung (translated in
the Standard Edition by the neologism ‘anaclisis’ or attachment; ibid., pp. 29–327):
To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose
of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later . . .

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116 John Fletcher
The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction then becomes detached from
the need for taking nourishment. (Freud, 1905, p. 180)
The sexual drive then deviates from the function to emerge independently in the
absence of need (e.g. hunger) in the later, auto-erotic moment of self-pleasuring that
Freud instances in the common infantile habit of sensual sucking, in which some
other bodily part – the thumb, fist or foot – substitutes for the breast, the original
object of both need and excitation. The sites of the vital somatic functions (mouth,
anus, genitals and ultimately large areas of the skin surface) become the erotogenic
zones. However, where the somatic functions were characterized by a predetermined
fixity of aim and object in the interests of the survival of the organism, by contrast,
the multiple, fragmented sexual drives, dispersed around various bodily sites, were
characterized by their contingency of aim and infinite substitutability of object, gov-
erned only by the erotogenic zone and the localized search for excitation and dis-
charge (Freud’s ‘organ-pleasure’). They become independent of any function such as
self-preservation or reproduction. They only later come to serve the latter under the
acquired primacy of the genitals, achieved through the processes of repression and
sublimation. In the second drive theory this opposition of ego-instincts and sexual
drives, along with its various differentiations, is collapsed, as the former opposites
are bundled together and subsumed under the heading of a generalized narcissistic
libido, now labelled Eros or the Life instinct, newly polarized against a supposedly
non-sexual Death instinct.
Laplanche’s retrieval of Freud’s early account of the specificity of the sexual Trieb
returns us to the obscured question of Trieb and Instinkt, drive and instinct, of the sexual
drive and the self-preservative functions, and the term through which Freud attempts to
think their relation: Anlehnung or ‘leaning-on’ (translated by Strachey’s clunky neolo-
gism ‘anaclisis’). In an early text (Laplanche, 1970, pp. 8–24) he had elaborated the
implications of Freud’s description of the ‘polymorphous perverse’ organ pleasure of
infantile sexuality as a deviation of sexuality, in its very emergence in a second moment,
from the self-preservative function with which it had previously coincided. In a late
essay (Laplanche, 2000) Laplanche returns to the ambiguous relation between drive and
instinct, in an attempt to elaborate a systematic account of it that avoids its reduction to
either of its component terms (the denial of Instinkt in Lacan or the conflation of sexual
drive and self-preservative function in Freud’s Life Instinct). He summarizes the model
of instinct taken up by Freud: ‘. . . instinct is hereditary, fixed, and adaptive; it starts with
somatic tension, has a specific action and a satisfying object, and leads to a sustained
relaxation of the tension’ (ibid., p. 12). He stresses the congruency of this model with
homeostasis as one of the requirements of the vital order, with its ‘return to a base level
that is optimal and not minimal’ (pp. 14–15); but also with an attachment to the nurtur-
ing adult that is communicational and proto-linguistic. By contrast, the infantile compo-
nent drive (unlike the hormonally driven genitality that comes with puberty) is neither
hereditary nor adaptive. With the instinctual aim satisfied by a complementary object,
the drive ‘seeks excitation even at the cost of total exhaustion’ (p. 14). He proposes a
paradox that is a reworking of Freud’s theses on the ‘diphasic onset of sexuality’ with its

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 117
faultline between the residues of infantile sexuality and the impulses of post-puberty
adult sexuality that makes their synthesis problematic, where not impossible:
What psychoanalysis teaches us – which seems utterly foreign – is that in
man the sexuality of intersubjective origin, that is, drive sexuality, the
sexuality that is acquired, comes before the sexuality that is innate. Drive
comes before instinct, fantasy before function; and when the sexual instinct
arrives [at puberty – JF], the seat is already occupied. (Laplanche, 2000,
p. 22, emphasis in the original)
The effect on the second topography of Freud’s reorganization of drive theory in
which sexuality is absorbed into the self-preservative instincts is to transform the sys-
tem of the repressed Ucs. into an id, in which, at the price of a major aporia, a new
acquisition is now added to the established characteristics of the former Ucs.: ‘We
picture it as open at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into itself
instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it, but we cannot say in
what substratum’ (Freud, 1933, p. 73). The foundation of the id is now the body with
its ‘instinctual needs’ and functions, always already there at the beginning, primor-
dial: ‘The core of our being, then, is formed by the obscure id . . . Within this id the
organic instincts operate, which are themselves compounded of fusions of two primal
forces (Eros and destructiveness) . . .’ (Freud, 1940, p. 197, emphasis in the original).
What is striking is that the very categories of repression and the repressed are so
marginalized as to be virtually dissolved away: ‘There is one portion of the id from
which the ego has separated itself by resistances due to repression. But the repression
is not carried over into the id: the repressed merges into the remainder of the id’
(Freud, 1933, p. 77). Along with the specificity of the sexual drive, the specificity of
the repressed is also lost, merging into the innate and the biological.

THE PRIMAL REPRESSED VERSUS THE PRIMORDIAL ID

In his comprehensive ‘Short treatise on the unconscious’, Laplanche (1993a) diagno-
ses a struggle internal to the Freudian field, homologous to the alternation between a
‘Copernican’ decentring and a ‘Ptolemaic’ recentring, between the unconscious as a
secondary formation produced by a primal repression and anti-cathexis that is specific
to an individual’s history, on the one hand, and on the other a primordial id that occu-
pies a first place. This id is primordial in terms of a psychological genesis – every-
thing which is conscious was first unconscious; primordial in terms of biology – the
id as ‘the great reservoir of the instincts’, pre-given rather than repressed, and opening
directly onto the body; primordial, finally, in terms of the species and phylogenesis,
the inherited schemata of the primal fantasies, an ‘archaic heritage’ encoding collec-
tive memory traces of prehistory, or else the assimilation of the unconscious drives to
an agonistic struggle of the great vital forces of the life and death instincts inherent in
all forms of living matter and tending towards the inorganic:
In Freudian thought, the concept of a mechanism of repression stands in
opposition to a dynamic of emergence from a ‘primal’ moment . . . But there

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118 John Fletcher
is worse: the point of view of repression tends more and more to be
subordinated to that of emergence, thus the notion of primal repression,
creator of the unconscious as a place, only appears sporadically after 1915;
from then on repression will be essentially secondary, that is bearing on
drive-impulses already present and welling up from the primordial, unre-
pressed unconscious. (Laplanche, 1993a, pp. 85–6, emphasis in the original)
Laplanche points to the problems involved in Freud’s attempt to combine the pri-
mordial id with the features of the system Ucs. Where Freud in 1933 claims that ‘the
repression is not carried over into the id’ (p. 77), by contrast Laplanche argues that
the classical features that characterize the functioning of the Ucs. derive precisely
from their genesis in the process of repression, a step Freud never took. In 1915 Freud
had summarized these features succinctly: ‘To sum up: exemption from mutual con-
tradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of
external by psychical reality – these are the characteristics which we may expect to
find in processes belonging to the system Ucs.’ (1915b, p. 187, emphasis in the origi-
nal). In 1933, Freud transposes the same list into his more detailed description of the
id. In his reconsideration of them in his ‘Short Treatise on the Unconscious’, Lap-
lanche locates these characteristics in relation to the 1915 description of primary
repression, clarified through his model of translation and repressive non-translation
that I have presented in a previous section of this paper.

The Absence of Time

There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time; there is no
recognition of the passage of time, and . . . no alteration of the mental
processes is produced by the passage of time. Wishful impulses . . .
impressions too that have been sunk into the id by repression, are virtually
immortal; after the passage of decades they behave as though they had just
occurred. They can only be recognized as belonging to the past, can only
lose their importance and be deprived of their cathexis of energy, when they
have been made conscious by the work of analysis . . . (Freud, 1933, p. 74)
In two previous papers on time8 Laplanche had distinguished between four levels of
time, two of which concern human psychical life. In these two papers he distinguishes
between Level II, the perceptual time of immediate consciousness, and Level III, the
time of memory, the life project and the temporalization of the human being. This
broadly corresponds to the distinction Freud made in the Leonardo study between the
time of the chronicler of contemporary events and the time of the retrospective histo-
rian, of legend and myths of origins. In a psycho-physiological reflection Freud had
derived Level II from the sample-taking activities of the sense organs, like ‘feelers
which are all the time making tentative advances towards the external world and then
withdrawing back from it’, concluding that ‘our abstract idea of time seems to be
wholly derived from the method of working of the system Percpt.-Cs. and to corre-
spond to a perception on its own part of that method of working’ (Freud, 1920, p. 28,

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 119
emphasis in the original). The time of immediate consciousness belongs to the
rhythms of perception in the preconscious–consciousness system. However, Lap-
lanche situates the working of repression at Level III, that of ‘afterwardsness’, the
time of memory, retrospection and the individual life-project:
It is at the level of temporalisation, conceived as narrativisation, as the
translation of enigmas coming from the other, as continual ‘self-theorization’,
that repression is located: in as much as it involves precisely the failure of
temporalisation and the deposit of untranslated residues. (Laplanche, 1993a,
p. 101, emphasis in the original)
He concludes that timelessness is not an accidental attribute of ‘das andere Psychi-
sche’, but ‘belongs to its very being, determined by its genesis: the exclusion of the
work of temporalisation proper to the preconscious–consciousness system’ (ibid.).

The Absence of Coordination and Negation

It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no
organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about
the satisfaction of needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.
The logical laws of thought do not apply in the id, and this is true of the law
of non-contradiction. Contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling
each other out or diminishing each other: at the most they may converge to
form compromises under the dominating economic pressure towards the dis-
charge of energy. There is nothing in the id that could be compared with
negation . . . The id of course knows no judgements of value: no good and
evil, no morality. (Freud, 1933, pp. 73–4)
The lack of coordination, of contradiction, of value and negation – to which one must
add the laws of syntax that structure speech and discourse – are all congruent features
of Freud’s conception of the system of the unconscious. Laplanche comments: ‘It is
precisely these links, differences, co-ordinations, which are abolished by repression’
(1993b, p. 103) and he cites Freud’s claim that repression operates ‘in a highly indi-
vidual manner’ at the micro-level: ‘Each single derivative of the repressed may have
its own special vicissitude’ (Freud, 1915b, p. 150, emphasis in the original). Even in
the 1915 papers, however, Freud had not drawn the inference that the ‘special charac-
teristics of the unconscious’ derive from the special characteristics of repression, and
by 1933 he could claim that ‘the repression is not carried over into the id; the
repressed merges into the remainder of the id’ (p. 77); that is, into the innate and the
biological. Consequently Laplanche argues that an id without organization or collec-
tive will, consisting of separate, uncoordinated impulses, governed by relations of
force not of logic:
seems hardly to accord with an endogenous id . . . conceived as ‘taking up
into itself instinctual needs’. Nothing, indeed, in the observation of living
organisms allows such disorganization of needs to be asserted – which

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120 John Fletcher
would moreover be incompatible with life. (Laplanche, 1993a, p. 103,
emphasis in the original)
The id so conceived is then antithetical, a potential risk to the ‘exigencies of life’,
invoked by Freud as early as the Project of 1895 to counter the dominance of the
primary principle of inertia and discharge of all excitations (Freud 1895/1950,
pp. 296–7), as well as to the functioning of the ego that safeguards them.
If the characteristics of the repressed are incompatible with the requirements of
organic life with its necessary homeostasis regulated by self-maintaining feedback
mechanisms, they are also incompatible with the Lacanian notion of an unconscious
‘structured like a language’. Laplanche argues:
Repression, the negative side of the translation of the enigmatic message, has
an effect of dislocation . . . translation dislocates what it rejects . . . these
abandoned signifiers have no relation between them, neither syntagmatic nor
paradigmatic. They do not form a second ‘signifying chain’ as Lacan would
claim: to paraphrase Freud, they persist side by side without influencing or
contradicting each other. (1993a, p. 104)
The untranslated, repressed elements excluded by the ego because of of their exces-
sive excitations, designified signifiers as Laplanche elsewhere calls them, do not form
a coherent sequence running parallel to conscious discourse, a bass cleff to its treble.
Drawing other associated elements into the unconscious, they create lacunae, absen-
ces or erupt in moments of sudden intensity, overdetermined switchwords or knotten-
punkte, that throw off course and disrupt conscious discourse and behaviour.

The Primary Process

The cathectic intensities [in the Ucs.] are much more mobile. By the process of
displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the
process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other
ideas. I have proposed to regard these two processes as distinguishing marks of the
so-called primary process. (Freud, 1915b, p. 186, emphasis in the original)
It even seems that the energy of these instinctual impulses is in a state different
from that in other regions of the mind, far more mobile and capable of
discharge; otherwise the displacements and condensations would not occur
which are characteristic of the id and which so completely disregard the quality
of what is cathected . . . (Freud, 1933, pp. 74–5, emphasis in the original)
Laplanche’s commentary on the role of the primary processes of displacement and
condensation in relation to the unconscious poses a theoretical question as to how the
process of repression can be seen to produce phenomena of such extreme mobility,
such urgency of discharge and such a degrading of the qualitative character and bind-
ing power of the object. ‘Yet such a mobility, implying incessant exchanges between
unconscious signifiers, seems to accord ill with the conception of thing-like

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 121
presentations as fixed, separated from one another by the process of repression’
(1993a, p. 106).
Laplanche points to Freud’s constant reference to the dreamwork and the formation
of symptoms (this goes back as far as the opening paragraphs of the unpublished Pro-
ject for a Scientific Psychology of 1895) as the basis for his postulation of the primary
processes, in the Project described as ‘quantity in a state of flow’ (Freud, 1895/1950,
p. 296). However these processes culminate not just in moments of pure discharge
but in objects – the dream, the joke, the symptom – and so a form of binding, and their
‘work’ often bears on the day’s residues or its equivalent that are preconscious, albeit
acting as a bridge or link to an unconscious element.
By contrast, ‘in support of the rigidity of the unconscious’ Laplanche cites ‘the rep-
etition compulsion which in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) is described as the
model of the return of the same, practically the identical’ (1993a, p. 106, translation
corrected). He also cites Freud’s major change of opinion on the question of resist-
ance, which in the form of the repetition compulsion is not just from the ego, but is
also described as ‘the resistance of the unconscious’ and defined as ‘the attraction
exerted by the unconscious prototypes upon the repressed instinctual process’ (Freud,
1926, pp. 159–60).
In response to this anomaly, Laplanche tentatively suggests a schematic distinction
between the primal repressed and the secondary repressed as different levels of the
unconscious. The former:
made up of ‘unconscious prototypes’, characterized by their fixity and the
effect of the attraction they exercise, not on each other, but on the
representations that come within their reach; and that of the secondary
repressed, to which the primary process applies. (Laplanche, 1993a, p. 106)
We have the paradox of a core of fixation that in its magnetic attraction on adjoining
psychical networks produces a speeded-up mobility in the secondarily repressed ele-
ments it conscripts into its compulsion to repeat.

THE OTHERNESS OF THE ID

do we absolutely, necessarily have to make the id a primal source, a force
according to a vital model, in order to restore its status as impersonal,
radically alien to the ‘superior’ system, or even to insist on the fact that it is
productive, or even that it is timeless? . . . are there models other than the
vitalist one which could account for the heterogeneity which comes to be
affirmed in the second topography? (Laplanche, 1981, p. 165)
In contemplating this apparent contradiction of fixation and mobility, and in response
to Laplanche’s questions above, we resume the theme of the ‘itness’, the impersonal-
ity, the blind unthinkingness – the idiocy – of the id. ‘Das andere Psychische’, the
other psychical thing, Freud’s introductory description of the id, to which Laplanche
draws our attention as a suggestive and resonant formula, is nevertheless, as Lap-
lanche himself demonstrates, at odds with the other incompatibles that Freud stuffs

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122 John Fletcher
into the ragbag of the id: the sexual drives, the primary processes, the instinctual func-
tions of self-preservation, the reservoir of narcissistic libido, the death instinct head-
ing for self-exhaustion and the ‘return’ to the inorganic, our phylogenetic, archaic
heritage, not to mention the residues of past generations of dead egos.
However, Freud’s phrase is resonant for Laplanche because it points to the briefly
formulated topic of primal repression in 1915, gradually forgotten though subject to
occasional resurgences as in the late text on anxiety (Freud, 1926). With its process
of blocking, refused entry to consciousness, primal repression excludes a hyper-
charged Vorstellung, an exciting, agitating idea or presentation which thereby
becomes permanently fixated and thus gives permanent definition to a Trieb or drive.
1915 is a year in which Freud’s thought circles around this question of what he calls
in another paper that year, in a formulation taken from Jung, ‘psychical inertia’. He
traces this back to ‘very early linkages . . . between instincts [Triebe, i.e. drives] and
impressions and the objects involved in those impressions’ (1915c, p. 272). This is
the moment of the creation of the drive permanently anchored in a reified, congealed
psychical thing, dislocated and decontextualized, isolated and ‘immortal’, the
unmoved mover that Laplanche calls the ‘source-object’, the remaindered, frag-
mented object become a source, of the drive. Laplanche’s conception of the otherness
of the id is based on this psychical thing (das andere Psychische) resistant to the
assimilations and translations of the ego whom it subjects to action and a drive-attack
from within, from the erogenously zoned body. This otherness of the psychical ‘It’,
the internal other thing, Laplanche insists, can only be grasped and sustained theoreti-
cally in relation to Freud’s ‘der Andere’, the external other, ‘the prehistoric unforget-
table other person, who is never equaled by anyone later’ (6 December 1896;
Masson, 1985, p. 213), ‘the prime originator’ (3 October 1897; ibid., p. 268), the adult
other of seduction.

NOTES
1. For an overview of Laplanche’s interpretive approach to the Freudian field, see Laplanche:
‘Interpreting (with) Freud’ (1968), ‘Exigency and going-astray’ (1993), ‘Sublimation and/or
inspiration’ (1999), in Fletcher and Ray (2014).
€
2. Freud’s German phrase is Eine Versagung der Ubersetzung, translated by both Strachey and
Masson as ‘a failure of translation’, implying a failure of the translation process due to the
resistance coming from the untranslated. However Laplanche argues in his ‘Terminologie
Raisonnee’ (Laplanche, 1989a) for a distinction between intransitive and transitive forms of
the German verb versagen. While the intransitive form is best translated as failure, the active
transitive form is best translated as refusal, for which he coins the French neologism le refuse-
ment as an equivalent to the German word ending in ‘–ung’ that denotes both the process and
its product. For a discussion of the metapsychological implications of these two forms of non-
translation (failed translation and refused translation), see Fletcher (2016).
3. Strachey’s misleading translation of Freud’s Trieb as ‘instinct’ has the tendency to collapse
the distinction between Freud’s two terms Trieb and Instinkt. While Freud nowhere reflects the-
oretically on the distinction and his use of Trieb is variable, his use of Instinkt consistently
refers to an inherited instinctual functioning, both in humans and animals, with fixed aims and
objects, not subject to the ‘vicissitudes’ of the sexual drives.

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Jean Laplanche: The Unconscious, The Id and the Other 123

4. For Laplanche’s critical consideration of Lacan’s axiom and rejection of it, see Laplanche
(1981, pp. 83–121).
5. Freud uses the German abbreviations System W (Wahrnehmungszeichen – translated as
‘indications of perception’) (Masson, 1985, p. 208), vbw (vorbewusste), ubw (unbewusste)
(Freud, 1923a, p. 251).
6. Laplanche gives a systematic reading of Groddeck’s theory and conception of the id and his
complaints about what he thought was Freud’s domestication of it (1981, pp. 142–62).
7. See Laplanche’s extensive discussion of the different versions of this concept in Laplanche
(1993b, pp. 27–52).
8. ‘Psychoanalysis, time and translation’ (Laplanche, 1989b), and ‘Time and the other’ (Lap-
lanche, 1992b).

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Laplanche, J. (1984) The drive and its object-source. Fletcher, J. & Thurston, L. (trans.). In:
Fletcher, J. (ed.), Essays on Otherness, pp. 117–32. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Blackwell, 1989.
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161–78. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992.
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25. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011.
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1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

JOHN FLETCHER is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Comparative Lit-
erary Studies at the University of Warwick and Senior Research Associate in the Psychoanaly-
sis Unit, University College London. He has published on a range of psychoanalytic topics,
mainly associated with the work of Freud, Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche, five volumes of
whose work he has edited and co-translated into English: Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Transla-
tion and the Drives (1992), Essays on Otherness (1999), New Formations no. 48 Jean Lap-
lanche and the Theory of Seduction (2003), Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006 (2011),
and, co-edited with Nicholas Ray, the collection, Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory,
Culture (2014). He has recently published a monograph on Freud and the Scene of Trauma
(2013). His overview of Laplanche’s metapsychology, ‘Seduction and the vicissitudes of trans-
lation: The work of Jean Laplanche’ appeared in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXVI(4), 2007.
He has also published numerous articles on literary and film topics from a psychoanalytic per-
spective: the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffman, Henry James, E.M. Forster, Wilhelm Jensen; the
poetry of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley
Hopkins; and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, John Brahms and George Cukor. Address for cor-
respondence: [[email protected]]

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