Freud came to reject his seduction theory – the belief that neurotic symptoms had at their heart a repressed memory of early sexual trauma – in favor of the internal, Oedipal model, whereby the child’s own incestuous sexual impulses were the source of repression. Laplanche proposes a return. It is not that he believes that every adult was sexually abused as a child; he instead uses the seduction theory to describe something more subtle. The way in which the child is imprinted, from the beginning of their life, by the enigmatic touch and language of an adult, which are both impingements (at the very least) and vital to life. Care, prohibition, tenderness, irritation: all arrive as messages the child cannot yet parse but wants to understand. A life is spent constructing workable ‘translations’ of what these messages must have meant. Analysis cannot recover an original meaning, but it may loosen the translations that hardened into necessity. Laplanche calls this ‘detranslation’. Not re-reading, but de-reading. Not necessarily because these translations are wrong, but because they do not serve the analysand. They are too rigid or punitive, restricting pleasure or freedom. In her 1999 therapy memoir, A Dialogue on Love, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes her therapist’s best comments as amounting to one message: ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’ For Laplanche, a ‘good’ re-reading is one that allows the analysand to be more open to life and its vicissitudes, rather than better adapted to social forms. It is strictly provisional, part of an ongoing practice of making and unmaking.
Claudia Grigg Edo, Therapy as Re-Reading
