Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise his work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today.
"Essays on Otherness" presents, for the first time in English, a key selection of the work of Jean Laplanche, one of the most important contemporary theorists of psychoanalysis whose work also has crucial implications for post-structuralist thought.
Since Freud's newly controversial abandonment of his seduction theory in 1897, psychoanalysis has given priority to the innate developmental program of the individual over the intersubjective relation to the other person. "Essays on Otherness" shows how Laplanche has returned to and reformulated Freud's abandoned seduction theory as a new theory of primal seduction, intrinsic to the everyday relations of childcare and nurturing. It is through this theory of primal seduction and the original relation to the other, that Laplanche sets a new foundation for psychoanalysis radically centered on the other.
'Essays on Otherness offers the most original, philosophical sophisticated, and far-reaching critical reading of Freud's metapsychology since Lacan. Exegetically scrupulous and rigorously argued, these essays go straight to the heart of the psychoanalytical enterprise.' - Peter Osborne, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University'[Laplanche's] philosophical and psychoanalytical studies are now becoming increasingly drawn upon by cultural theorists and critics, and this work is helped enormously by the publication of Essays on Otherness and the comprehensive and illuminating introduction by John Fletcher.' - New Formations
