Jean Laplanche

Based on Wikipedia: Jean Laplanche

The Psychoanalyst Who Made Wine

Here is a fact that sounds made up: for decades, one of the most important psychoanalytic theorists in the world also ran a fifty-acre vineyard in Burgundy. His wine was marketed with a label that would make Freud himself smile: "the only wine in the world grown and bottled by an old disciple of Lacan's."

Jean Laplanche was that rare figure who refused to be confined to a single identity. Philosopher. Resistance fighter. Psychoanalyst. Winemaker. Each role fed the others in ways that illuminate something essential about how original thinking actually works.

The journal Radical Philosophy called him "the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day." That assessment came not from some marginal thinker but from a serious publication evaluating his contribution to understanding the human mind. What made Laplanche so distinctive was his willingness to read Freud more carefully than Freud read himself—and then to say, plainly, where the founder of psychoanalysis had gone wrong.

A Life Shaped by War and Ideas

Laplanche grew up in the Côte d'Or region of France, the heart of Burgundy wine country. As a teenager in the early 1940s, he threw himself into Catholic Action, a left-wing organization focused on social justice. This wasn't the comfortable Catholicism of Sunday mass and charitable donations. Catholic Action represented a serious engagement with the question of how faith should translate into political action.

In 1943, with France under the collaborationist Vichy regime, the nineteen-year-old Laplanche joined the French Resistance. He was active in both Paris and Bourgogne, risking his life while still a philosophy student at the École Normale Supérieure, France's most prestigious training ground for intellectuals.

His teachers read like a who's who of mid-century French philosophy. Jean Hyppolite introduced him to Hegel. Gaston Bachelard taught him to think about science and imagination. Maurice Merleau-Ponty showed him how to analyze perception and embodiment. These weren't just names on a syllabus; they were thinkers who would shape how Laplanche approached every problem he later encountered.

After the war, Laplanche did something unexpected. He went to Harvard for a year in 1946, but instead of joining the philosophy department—the obvious choice for someone with his training—he enrolled in the Department of Social Relations. There he discovered psychoanalysis. Not as therapy, not as treatment, but as a theoretical framework for understanding the mind.

Finding Lacan, Then Finding His Own Path

Back in France, Laplanche began attending lectures by Jacques Lacan, the most controversial and influential psychoanalyst of the era. Lacan's seminars were legendary events in Parisian intellectual life, drawing philosophers, artists, and writers alongside clinicians. Laplanche didn't just listen. He underwent psychoanalytic treatment with Lacan himself.

On Lacan's advice, Laplanche enrolled in medical school. This was the traditional path for psychoanalysts—Freud himself had been a neurologist—though it meant years of additional training for someone already steeped in philosophy. Laplanche completed his doctorate and became an analyst, joining the International Psychoanalytical Association, the professional body Freud had established to maintain standards in the field.

But Laplanche was never simply a Lacanian. His relationship with Lacan's ideas was one of productive tension. Where Lacan emphasized language and the symbolic order, drawing heavily on structural linguistics, Laplanche kept returning to something more primal: the actual encounter between adults and infants, and how that encounter creates the unconscious mind.

Revolution and Disillusionment

Laplanche's political commitments remained active alongside his intellectual work. In 1948, he became a founding member of Socialisme ou Barbarie—"Socialism or Barbarism"—a group that had broken with Trotskyism to develop new forms of left-wing political theory.

The group attracted serious thinkers. Cornelius Castoriadis, who would later become famous for his work on the social imaginary, was a central figure. But Laplanche found the atmosphere increasingly impossible. Castoriadis, he later said, "exerted hegemony over the journal," creating a dynamic that stifled rather than encouraged genuine intellectual exchange.

Still, Laplanche remained sympathetic to the group's core thesis until 1968, when the upheavals of that year—student protests, general strikes, the sense that revolutionary change might actually be possible—apparently shifted something in his thinking. He never fully explained what changed, but his political energies increasingly focused on his academic and clinical work.

The Language of Psycho-Analysis

In 1967, Laplanche and his colleague Jean-Bertrand Pontalis published a book that would become indispensable to anyone studying Freud. The Language of Psycho-Analysis was an encyclopedic reference work, but not the dry kind. It traced the development of key psychoanalytic concepts, showing how Freud's ideas had evolved and how later analysts had transformed them.

The book succeeded because it took seriously a problem that plagues psychoanalysis: the same words mean different things to different practitioners. When someone says "the ego," do they mean what Freud meant in 1895, or what he meant in 1923, or what American ego psychologists meant in the 1950s? Laplanche and Pontalis mapped this terminological terrain with precision and clarity.

By 1997, the book had reached its thirteenth French edition. It was translated into English in 1973 and remains the standard reference in the field. One professor called it "the best reference in English of its kind"—high praise for a work originally written in French.

Reading Freud Against Freud

Laplanche's most original contribution was methodological. He applied the psychoanalytic method—the careful attention to slips, contradictions, and unconscious meanings—to Freud's own writings. This wasn't debunking or hero worship. It was reading Freud more carefully than Freud had read himself.

The key insight came from Freud's early "seduction theory." In the 1890s, Freud believed that neurosis originated in actual sexual abuse during childhood. His patients told him stories of being seduced by adults—parents, nurses, relatives—and Freud initially took these stories literally. Then, famously, he changed his mind. He decided the seduction scenes were fantasies, not memories. This shift launched psychoanalysis as we know it, with its emphasis on internal fantasy rather than external reality.

Most interpreters see Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory as a necessary correction—he had been naive about his patients' stories. Laplanche saw something different. Freud hadn't simply been wrong about whether abuse happened. He had glimpsed something crucial about how the unconscious forms, then lost sight of it.

The Copernican Revolution That Freud Abandoned

Freud repeatedly compared his discovery of the unconscious to the Copernican revolution. Just as Copernicus showed that Earth was not the center of the universe, Freud showed that the conscious ego was not the master of the mind. There were forces operating beneath awareness, driving behavior in ways the conscious self could not control or even perceive.

Laplanche loved this comparison—but with a twist. He argued that Freud was "his own Copernicus but also his own Ptolemy." Freud had made the revolutionary discovery, then partially retreated from it.

The Copernican side was the early seduction theory, which insisted that the unconscious comes from outside—from the intrusive impact of adult sexuality on the helpless infant. The Ptolemaic side was Freud's later emphasis on innate drives and internal fantasy, which put the individual psyche back at the center of its own development.

Laplanche titled one of his most important essay collections "The Unfinished Copernican Revolution." His life's work was to complete what Freud had started.

The General Theory of Seduction

In 1987, Laplanche published New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, which laid out his "general theory of seduction." The word "general" is crucial. Laplanche wasn't talking about sexual abuse in the narrow sense. He was describing something that happens to every human being.

Here's the situation. An infant is completely dependent on adults for survival. Those adults care for the child through intimate physical contact—feeding, cleaning, holding, comforting. But the adults are not empty vessels. They have their own unconscious lives, their own sexuality, their own unresolved conflicts from their own infancies.

The adult's unconscious inevitably leaks into their interactions with the child. A mother nursing her infant experiences physical sensations that connect to her own erotic life, even if she's not consciously aware of this connection. She transmits messages to the child that contain meanings she herself doesn't fully understand.

Laplanche called these "enigmatic signifiers"—communications that carry more meaning than the sender intends or the receiver can decode. The child receives messages it cannot translate. This failure of translation is not a bug but a feature. It's how the unconscious gets created.

The enigma is in itself a seduction and its mechanisms are unconscious.

This is subtle but important. The unconscious isn't something we're born with, in Laplanche's view. It's not waiting inside us like an organ. It's created through the encounter with adult others whose messages exceed our capacity to understand them. We repress not because we're afraid of our own drives, but because we cannot translate what has been transmitted to us.

Why This Matters

The standard psychoanalytic story goes something like this: we're born with drives—toward pleasure, toward destruction, toward attachment—and development consists of learning to manage those drives within social constraints. The id is there from the start, and the ego develops to regulate it.

Laplanche reversed the direction. The Other comes first. We don't start with drives that get socialized; we start with enigmatic messages from others that we cannot process, and this unprocessed material becomes our drives. Sexuality, in the psychoanalytic sense, is not biological instinct. It's the residue of failed translation.

This has practical implications for therapy. If the unconscious is formed through the encounter with the other, then it can potentially be reformed through another such encounter—namely, the relationship with the analyst. The transference, where patients experience their analyst as a figure from their past, isn't just a phenomenon to be analyzed. It's a repetition of the original enigmatic situation, and it offers a chance for new translation.

Drive Versus Instinct

One of Laplanche's consistent battles was over a German word: Trieb. Freud used this term constantly, and English translators rendered it as "instinct." Laplanche insisted this was wrong. Trieb should be translated as "drive."

This sounds like academic hairsplitting, but the stakes are high. An instinct, in ordinary language, is a biologically programmed behavior pattern. Birds instinctively build nests. Salmon instinctively return to their spawning grounds. If human sexuality is an instinct, it's fundamentally a biological phenomenon with a natural aim and object.

A drive is different. A drive is a pressure, a demand, but without a predetermined object or aim. Human sexuality, Laplanche argued, is not instinctual. It doesn't have a natural goal. Its objects and aims are created through history, through the encounter with others, through the process of failed translation that creates the unconscious.

This distinction separates Laplanche from most English-speaking psychoanalytic schools—ego psychology, object relations theory, even much Kleinian thought. Those traditions, whatever their differences, tend to assume some biological foundation for sexuality. Laplanche, following Lacan but going his own way, removes that foundation. Human sexuality is not natural. It's an artifact of our peculiar situation as creatures born into language, cared for by adults whose messages we cannot decode.

Gender Before Sex

Laplanche also made important contributions to thinking about gender. In Freud, he noted, the category of gender is often "absent or unnoticed." Freud focused on biological sex and its psychological consequences—the famous penis and its equally famous envy—without adequately theorizing how people come to identify as boys or girls, men or women.

For Laplanche, gender assignment begins immediately. From the moment of birth (or even before, with ultrasound), the child is bombarded with what he called "prescriptive messages." Pink or blue. Dresses or pants. Trucks or dolls. "Such a strong boy" or "such a pretty girl."

These messages come from parents, grandparents, siblings, and everyone in the child's world. They carry the fantasies and unconscious expectations of the adults who transmit them. And like all the enigmatic signifiers of early life, they exceed what the child can translate.

Yes, gender precedes sex. But instead of organizing it, it is organized by the latter.

This is a complex formulation. Gender comes first, chronologically—we're assigned a gender before we understand anything about anatomical sex. But the sexual, in the psychoanalytic sense, reorganizes gender. The infantile sexuality of the adults "creates a fuss in gender-assignation," because their own unresolved conflicts get transmitted in the messages they send.

The Vineyard

Throughout these decades of theoretical work, Laplanche was also making wine. Château de Pommard is a serious operation—fifty acres in Burgundy, with the longest continuous vineyard in the Côte d'Or region. Laplanche and his wife Nadine lived on the estate and participated in every aspect of winemaking.

In 2003, the couple sold the estate but negotiated an arrangement to remain on the property and continue participating in production. The director Agnès Varda interviewed them for her documentary The Gleaners and I, talking about both wine and psychoanalysis. It's an unusual combination of subjects, but perhaps not for someone whose life work was about what gets transmitted between people, and how the material that passes between us exceeds our understanding.

Nadine died in spring 2010. Jean lived on at Pommard until his death two years later, in May 2012. He was eighty-seven years old.

The Translator of Freud

From 1988 until his death, Laplanche served as scientific director for an enormous project: the first complete French translation of Freud's works. This wasn't just an academic exercise. Translation, for Laplanche, was central to understanding what psychoanalysis actually claims.

Freud wrote in German, and the German language shaped his concepts in ways that don't transfer automatically to other languages. The very act of translating Freud forces you to confront ambiguities and choices that remain hidden when you read him in the original or in an established translation you take for granted.

Moreover, Laplanche had extracted from Freud's theory of repression an insight about translation itself. In his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud suggested that repression involves a failure to translate psychic material from one "language" to another—from one developmental stage to the next. The repressed is precisely what couldn't be translated.

So when Laplanche spent decades overseeing the translation of Freud into French, he wasn't just making texts available to readers who didn't know German. He was enacting, at the level of the text, the very process his theory described as constitutive of the unconscious.

Legacy

Laplanche received honorary doctorates from the University of Lausanne, the University of Buenos Aires, and the University of Athens. He won the Mary S. Sigourney Award in 1995, one of the most prestigious recognitions in psychoanalysis. France made him a Knight of Arts and Letters in 1990.

He taught at the University of Paris from 1970 to 1993, introducing psychoanalytic teaching into the clinical human sciences program and supervising students who now teach the subject across France and Latin America. He founded a research journal, Psychanalyse à l'université, that ran for nearly twenty years.

But perhaps his most lasting contribution is a way of reading—reading Freud, reading patients, reading the signs that pass between people. Laplanche showed that careful attention to what someone says, combined with willingness to take their words more seriously than they take them themselves, can reveal structures of meaning that would otherwise remain hidden.

The unconscious, in his view, is not a dark reservoir of forbidden wishes. It's the sediment of communications we couldn't process, messages that arrived from others before we had the equipment to decode them. We are haunted not by our own desires but by the desires of those who cared for us, which we received without understanding and carry within us still.

This is the unfinished Copernican revolution. The ego is not the center of the mental universe. At the core of what we are most intimate with—our own minds—lies something alien: the other's messages, which we have translated imperfectly and which continue to work on us without our knowledge or consent.