2 books by Jonathan House (USA)
Rationalism and Emancipation in Psychoanalysis
The definition of psychoanalysis is a question largely hidden by cultural conditions favoring eclecticism, yet claiming importance for psychoanalysis is meaningless without specifying what one means by the term. Could one seriously argue, for instance, that Lacanian approaches are examples of the same conception of psychoanalysis as that embodied in relational approaches based on attachment theory? Invoking the existence of a “common ground” of clinical practice convinces only if one is persuaded that theory has no influence on practice. If there is a common ground that defines psychoanalysis, the next question is how can we judge in what ways psychoanalysis deserves support?
Laplanche’s work directly addresses these questions. Helene Tessier’s new title, co-translated and edited by Jonathan House for UIT Books, outlines Laplanche’s approach and emphasizes how his affiliation within the rationalist tradition, most centrally through his principal contribution, The General Theory of Seduction and its links to the mode of action of psychoanalysis, constitutes one of the criteria that help establish his theory’s validity.
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The Unfinished Copernican Revolution
This selection of Laplanche’s most important essays from 1967 to 1992 is edited by Jonathan House and translated by Luke Thurston.
“The appearance of Laplanche’s The Unfinished Copernican Revolution in English is an event of huge importance not only for psychoanalysis but also for many other spheres of intellectual life,” Thurston opines in his preface.
Since his death in 2012, Laplanche’s status as one of the most influential and creative thinkers in the psychoanalytic tradition has been increasingly recognized in the Anglophone world, and his work is now an essential reference in any discussion of the significance and history of the Freudian discovery. . . If Laplanche may be beginning, by 2020, to seem like a known quantity, The Unfinished Copernican Revolution will offer plenty of surprises . . . and for the first time allows the reader to trace the extraordinary development of his work, its consistent concerns and motifs as well as its great reconstellations and leaps forward. His primary concern – indeed, the mainspring of all his work – is the task of reading Freud and interpreting the complex history of psychoanalytic thought since its inception more than a century ago.
But what is always essential for Laplanche is to approach that task not merely as a dry academic exercise but as a contribution to the clinical practice and cultural presence of psychoanalysis in his own time. It is an affirmation of the presence of psychoanalysis, its continuing life and salience in our societies, that is one of Laplanche’s great accomplishments. He argued passionately against psychoanalysis retreating from the world, sealing itself off in its own bubble of arcane theory, and no longer addressing issues of public significance or contemporary relevance.
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Jonathan House, MD is the general editor of The Unconscious in Translation (UIT Books), which was first established in consultation with Jean Laplanche. Dr. House teaches at Columbia University at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Fondation Laplanche and practices psychiatry and psychoanalysis in New York City.
Jonathan House, MD
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