Adam Phillips · Against Self-Criticism
Podcast by psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips
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Adam Phillips · Against Self-Criticism Self-criticism can be our most unpleasant – our most sadomasochistic – way of loving ourselves.
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Jean Laplanche - ON THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF BABIES
On the Psychoanalysis of Babies[1]
Jean Laplanche
[Translator’s note: “On the Psychoanalysis of Babies” is Jean Laplanche’s response to a 2007 essay by Bernard Golse, Head of Child Psychiatry at the Hôpital Necker–Enfants Malades and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Université René Descartes. Golse’s essay, “Y a-t-il une psychanalyse possible des bébés?(“Is There Any Possible Psychoanalysis of Babies?”),[2] contests the charge that a “psychoanalysis of children – and still less of babies – has no claim to a legitimate existence” (354). This charge, he argues, is based on the belief that infants are not from outset situated within the temporality of ‘après-coup’, i.e. what Freud called Nachträglichkeit (see note 3, below). To challenge this view, Golse returns to Freud’s original development of Nachträglichkeit and draws extensively on Laplanche’s resumption of it in his ‘general theory of seduction’. Working through a series of accounts of very early infant experience (e.g. the losses of developmental mourning and the apprehension of intersubjectivity, as well as, still earlier, intrauterine existence) Golse argues that from the metapsychological point of view even the youngest infant cannot be said to be outside the temporality of après-coup: tracing back to an original first trauma will always, he claims, be a “fundamentally asymptotic” endeavour (355). To the extent that the theory of après-coup thus remains valid for the understanding of infants themselves, it is possible to “remain a psychoanalyst” in work with young babies and this work may be considered “authentically psychoanalytic” (360).]
Bernard Golse and I share a mutual understanding that is solid and amiable (on both sides). I shall not discuss his deliberately provocative title concerning a ‘possible psychoanalysis’ of babies. I simply wonder, and assent to the idea that a psychoanalyst cannot and must not forget for a moment that he is an analyst in the presence of a baby. There is, however, a world of difference between this and ‘psychoanalysing’; for one may just as easily be a psychoanalyst in the presence of an ulcerated patient, a paraplegic or someone dying, without, for all that, having recourse to the psychoanalytic act.
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Laplanche, Jean
Compiled by John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray, September 2012
Books (including untranslated volumes)
Laplanche, Jean (1961) Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, trans. Luke Carson, Victoria, Canada: ELS Editions, 2007.
-------(1970) Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
-------(1980) Problématiques I: L’angoisse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
-------(1980) Problématiques II: Castration – Symbolisations, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [Extract, “Lecture 20 May, 1975” {Anxiety and Symbolization}, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Literary Debate : Texts and Contexts, eds. Dennis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman, New York: The New Press, 1999.]
-------(1980) Problématiques III: La sublimation, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [Extract, “To Situate Sublimation”, trans. Richard Miller, October, no. 28, Spring, 1984].
-------(1981) The Unconscious and the Id: A Volume of Laplanche’s Problématiques (Problématiques IV), trans. Luke Thurston, London: Rebus Press, 1999.
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