Most critics have come to terms with the contradictions in Freud's work by attempting to impose a unified system even at the cost of rejecting crucial metapyschological concepts such as the death wish. According to Jean Laplanche, "such variations or variants deserve better than a choice in favor of one of the other: they require an interpretation and such as interpretation implies that, as is the case with the analysis of dreams, all the elements be juxtaposed so that nothing be eliminated, that the either / or be retanslatedinto an and."

In a way that Freud plainly does not control, Laplanche argures, there are at work two different concepts corresponding to each of a series of crucial Freudian terms; in each of these conceptual pairs of one of the elements is solidary with a specific conceptual scheme and the other with a second one. The entire body of Freud's work, for Laplanche, is constituted as an elaborately structured polemical field in which two mutually exclusive schemes may be seen to be struggling to dominate a single terminological apparatus.

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a painstakingly lucid inquiry into the interpretative consequences of the conceptual and terminological difficulties posed by Freud's texts. It is an uncannily precise delineation of the perverse rigor with which Freud's most virulent discoveries perpetually escape him-and are endlessly rediscovered.

About the Author
Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor at Boston University and the author, most recently, of Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years and Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France.

Reviews
Laplanche's work is much more accessible than Jacques Lacan's; is it too much to hope that his brilliant work will help to reconcile American intellectuals to rigorous speculative thought? -- Leo Bersani Partisan Review Laplanche's work is much more accessible than Jacques Lacan's; is it too much to hope that his brilliant work will help to reconcile American intellectuals to rigorous speculative thought? -- Leo Bersani Partisan Review



Book Information
ISBN 9780801827303
Author Jean Laplanche
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 227g