Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality

Abstract

Abstract This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the "reality of the message," in which gestures from the other both signify and excite/seduce, and an enlarged meaning of seduction. The child's translation of the enigmatic messages conveyed by the adult is a process of being seduced into building interiority and subjectivity. In effect, the present paper proposes not only that "otherness" constitutes the subject, but that an "asymmetrical intersubjectivity" is what enables the transition from instinct to drive and the creation of paradoxical human sexuality. In a meditation that illuminates significant issues in American feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Laplanche's essay analyzes and distinguishes three interrelated terms, gender, sex, and "the sexual" ("le sexual"), or so-called "infantile sexuality", the latter documenting a Freudian and French emphasis on an additional, counter-realistic, counter-adaptational, and counter-social conception of sexuality. What stands out in this paper no less than "le sexual" is the use of the term "gender" by a French psychoanalyst, who is at once nodding in acknowledgment to contemporary American thinking, and enlisting the concept of gender to reaffirm its "intimate enemy," infantile sexuality, "le sexual." Laplanche sees the American-conceived couple sex/gender as a "formidable tool against the Freudian discovery." Formidableness is what is common to gender and to infantile sexuality, in that both concepts resist and destroy the clear-cut biological/anatomical "destiny" of sex. Both pertain to cultural/acquired/constructed aspects of sexuality; both are phantasmatic and both subvert sexual role divisions. But gender is organized by, hence possibly subordinate to, sex. Laplanche acknowledges gender yet at the same time he makes it dependent on sexuality and thereby "downgrades" it in favor of the inarticulate, perverse, subversive, untameable aspect of human sexuality—"le sexual", infantile sexuality—which remains outside and in excess of gender. Notes 1In addition to undergoing a medical and then a psychoanalytic training, during which he was analyzed by Lacan, from whom he substantially diverges, and in my opinion, whom he importantly amends, Laplanche was an activist in the Resistance during WWII and until recently a wine-grower in the vineyards surrounding Chateau Pommard (and where his wife artistically designed the tags on the various brands and bottles. For more details in English, see Wikipedia.org on Jean Laplanche). 2Laplanche opposes Lacan's linguistically dominated view of the unconscious; he therefore changed Lacan's "signifier" into "message," emphasizing the concrete, intersubjective dimension of communication. 3This is strongly reminiscent of CitationBion's (1962) "thoughts without a thinker," thoughts which need a structure to be built in order to conceive and host them. 4This is a response to critics who see Laplanche's work as neglecting the creative dimensions of sexual subjectivity. Two examples are J Rose: Laplanche's reinterpretation of primary repression means that the "child receives everything from the outside" (CitationFletcher and Stanton, 1992, p. 61), desire being inscribed within the repressed unconscious via the deformations of parental sexuality itself and CitationElliot (2005): too much power accorded to the other over psychic interiority, or the outside as constitutive of desire itself. 5This perspective contrasts with Levenson's view of mystification as pathogenic by definition, and with Kohut's emphasis on mother's faithful, empathic mirroring 6 CitationFonagy (2006) attributes the development of sexuality to mother's discordant, alien(ated), even tantalizing, sadistically skewed mirroring of her child [add]. 7Laplanche calls human beginnings masochistic, even if there is no sadist. The effraction of the other, being assaulted by the drives and by unconscious fantasy that colonizes the psyche like an internal foreign body, makes for an excitement blended with a certain pain. CitationLeo Bersani (1986) is a profound thinker who talks about the masochistic core of sexuality that comes with its (sought) effect of shattering boundaries and the ego. 8Lacan's theory of the ego ideal as springing from the idealized, totalized illusory mirror reflection of a child's fragmented, uncoordinated, immature body, reflected back to the infant in the mirror stage, and constituting the core of the personality, may have been an influence on Laplanche here. 9By speaking of the "reality of the message" Laplanche introduces a third term which escapes mutually exclusive divisions, and with which he then works wonders at clarifying the role of time and temporality both in trauma and in human life in general by accounting for the non-linearity of psychic time and for the afterwardness, as he calls it, of temporality. These fascinating issues are outside the scope of this essay, but they lie at the periphery of our concern here, and mentioning them might give us some grasp of where we are going. 10The difference between adult and child is deemed the most important interpersonal difference in Laplanche's theory. 11But infant has "affective codes" at its disposal (cf. Stern, Trevarthen, etc.), which develop through the parent. There are no affects in Laplanche's theory. What to do, how to say it? Say it or not? 12Interestingly, CitationBenjamin (1988) sees the death drive as the result of lack of containment of another subject, whereas Laplanche regards the death drive as a "normal" phenomenon, part of sexuality. 13It is interesting to compare Laplanche's and Fonagy's views of the early mother-child relationship. In contrast to Fonagy who talks about the mother in secure attachment who "unifies" infant by mentalizing him, Laplanche talks about the other's subversive, compromised, even fragmenting response and "implanting" pieces of their mind into infant. For Fonagy, the "crazy" ("borderline") responses of the normally attuned and potentially securely attaching mother, are what creates sexuality in the child. 14The present paper, unlike earlier works, does not elaborate this concept directly; neither are references provided to Laplanche's earlier writings on the topic. 15We may go further, and by way of complementarity, liken the incredulous and perhaps repulsed attitude toward the notion of infantile sexuality to similar or complementary feelings children may have on perceiving or conceiving the primal scene of parental sexuality. 16No wonder that Laplanche regards infantile sexuality as inherently perverse. 17The idea of sexuality (or Oedipality) before sexual difference can be found in Lacan (cf. CitationShepherdson, 2000). 18Laplanche first introduced the term in 1980: "I would say, to take up a term that is brought center stage in English language works … that there is, in a pre-castrative stage, a recognition of a distinction of gender that precedes sexual differentiation (the difference of the sexes)" (Problematiques II, p. 33, Footnote 1). 19Interestingly, currents in queer theory share with Laplanche a similar "downgrading" of gender in favor of sexuality. 20In response to the question whether the elaboration by the child of its gender assignment is preverabl, Laplanche affirms that the assignation dates from the pre-verbal period, but the reworking, the "translation", of it comes after the primal seductions, at about the beginning of the second year, when the child begins to say "I am a girl" or "I am a boy." When he is then further asked whether primal seduction is not gendered for the child, Laplanche admits that this is a "very complicated question. There are obviously elements of gender—of sex—of sexuality (my triad) entering the very first seductions. 21 CitationDerrida's (2005) logic of domination and subjugation, CitationHorkheimer and Adorno's (1987) logic of the either-or come to mind, but particularly CitationChasseguet-Smirgel's (1976) "phallic monism." 22An adult, a more evolved other, and a child, a "smaller," less evolved other.