In 1997, the Presses Universitaires de France commissioned Dominique

Scarfone for another book for their series Psychanalystes d’aujourd’hui. The

result was Jean Laplanche, now available in Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz’s

brilliantly clear English translation as ＂Laplanche: an introduction.＂ More than

an overview of Laplanche’s career, Scarfone’s text presents an unparalleled

insight into the mechanisms, provocations, and spectacular theoretical

achievements of Laplanche’s work, which has been increasingly recognized

as integral to Francophone-and more recently, Anglophone-psychoanalytic

practice and theory.

This volume brings together Scarfone’s book with two representative works

of Laplanche’s writing: his introduction to the French translation of Freud’s

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, perhaps the last major work completed before

his death in 2012; and Fantasme Originaire, Fantasmes des Origines, Origines

du Fantasme, the classic 1964 essay written in collaboration with J.-B.

Pontalis, in a new translation by Jonathan House. Finally, this volume includes

a complete bibliography of Laplanche’s work, in English and in French.

Jean Laplanche was described by Radical Philosophy as ＂the most original

and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day.＂ Studying

philosophy under Hyppolite, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty, he became an

active member of the French Resistance under the Vichy regime. Under the

influence (and treatment) of Jacques Lacan, Laplanche came to earn a

doctorate in medicine and was certified as a psychoanalyst. He eventually

broke ties with Lacan and began regularly publishing influential contributions

to psychoanalytic theory, his first volume appearing in 1961. In 1967 he

published, with his colleague J.-B. Pontalis, the celebrated encyclopaedia The

Language of Psychoanalysis. Member of the International Psychoanalytic

Association, co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France,

emeritus professor and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at

the Université de Paris VII, and assistant professor at the Sorbonne, he also

oversaw, as scientific director, the translation of Freud’s complete oeuvre into

French for the Presses Universitaires de France.