Seduction and the vicissitudes of translation: the work of Jean Laplanche

This paper aims to analyze Jean Laplanche's revision of Freudian metapsychology, which emerged from a critical return to Freud's officially abandoned seduction theory of 1895-1897. Where Freud gradually replaced the model of traumatic seduction with a theory of infantile sexuality and its drives, Laplanche articulates both trauma and sexual drive in a new theory of primal seduction, the fundamental anthropological situation in which human subjectivity is formed. The author concludes by considering Laplanche's modeling of the psychoanalytic situation and his reformulation of transference in relation to mourning and sublimation within the framework of the general theory of seduction.     

Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical review

This article surveys Freud's various versions of the seduction theory, from 1896 to 1933. It is concluded that the seduction theory had never been based on the patients' direct statements and conscious recall of seduction by the father in early childhood--unlike what Freud was to state much later (1933). This early seduction was mostly reconstructed by Freud from the patient's verbal material and behavior in treatment (including memories of sexual experiences from later childhood) which he interpreted as disguised and incomplete "reproductions" and reenactments of the original seduction trauma. Further, the external trauma was never meant to account by itself for the later neurotic symptoms. The "delayed action" of its unconscious memory, producing the repression of an event from the time of puberty, was a necessary part of the process. Thus internal psychic transformations and conflicts, anticipating Freud's later emphasis on fantasy and psychic reality, were already an intrinsic part of the seduction etiology of 1896. It is also noted that the father played no central role in the original theory as presented in 1896; it is only in the letters to Fliess that the father emerged as the prime seducer. The implications of this clarification of the seduction theory for the understanding of the changes and continuity in the development of Freud's theories are highlighted; their relevance to ongoing issues in psychoanalysis about the role of external trauma, fantasy, and reconstruction are briefly examined.