Laplanche

Dominique Scarfone, MD is a psychoanalyst in private practice, a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (Montreal French Branches) and a former full professor at the Université de Montréal. He was an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and he is presently chairing the Executive committee of the journal's College. ¿The author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, he published a number of books, among which Laplanche: An introduction and The Unpast. The Actual Unconscious, both published in 2015 in New York by UIT - The Unconscious in Translation. He co-edited with Howard B. Levine and Gail Reed Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac, 2013).

In 1997, the Presses Universitaires de France commissioned DominiqueScarfone for another book for their series Psychanalystes d'aujourd'hui. Theresult was Jean Laplanche, now available in Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz'sbrilliantly clear English translation as "Laplanche: an introduction." More thanan overview of Laplanche's career, Scarfone's text presents an unparalleledinsight into the mechanisms, provocations, and spectacular theoreticalachievements of Laplanche's work, which has been increasingly recognizedas integral to Francophone-and more recently, Anglophone-psychoanalyticpractice and theory.This volume brings together Scarfone's book with two representative worksof Laplanche's writing: his introduction to the French translation of Freud'sBeyond the Pleasure Principle, perhaps the last major work completed beforehis death in 2012; and Fantasme Originaire, Fantasmes des Origines, Originesdu Fantasme , the classic 1964 essay written in collaboration with J.-B.Pontalis, in a new translation by Jonathan House. Finally, this volume includesa complete bibliography of Laplanche's work, in English and in French.Jean Laplanche was described by Radical Philosophy as "the most originaland philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day." Studyingphilosophy under Hyppolite, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty, he became anactive member of the French Resistance under the Vichy regime. Under theinfluence (and treatment) of Jacques Lacan, Laplanche came to earn adoctorate in medicine and was certified as a psychoanalyst. He eventuallybroke ties with Lacan and began regularly publishing influential contributionsto psychoanalytic theory, his first volume appearing in 1961. In 1967 hepublished, with his colleague J.-B. Pontalis, the celebrated encyclopaedia TheLanguage of Psychoanalysis. Member of the International PsychoanalyticAssociation, co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de Franceemeritus professor and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research atthe Université de Paris VII, and assistant professor at the Sorbonne, he alsooversaw, as scientific director, the translation of Freud's complete oeuvre intoFrench for the Presses Universitaires de France.