Article

EXIGENCY AND GOING ASTRAY1

Jean LaplancheUniversity of Paris (VII)

Correspondence: Professor Jean Laplanche, 55 rue de Varenne, Paris France

Abstract

In this piece, Laplanche returns to and develops the insights of the earlier ‘‘Interpreting’’

essay. He goes on to give a striking re-elaboration of the idea of ‘‘exigency’’ in terms of his

own reformulation of Freudian drive theory, arguing that evolution of Freud’s thought is

constrained and driven (pousse) to re-enact the evolution of the object it thinks: the

narcissistic closure of the human psyche. In this connection Laplanche also introduces the

related notion of theoretical ‘‘goings astray’’ (fourvoiements) – the extensive coverings-over

of the radical Copernican essence of Freud’s own discovery, which the exigency of his

thought has brought about. As such, this second piece sets out two concepts which, for

Laplanche, define the major discursive axes of Freud’s oeuvre and thus orient the critical

exposition of Freud which is so crucial to Laplanche’s own theoretical work.

KeywordsFreud; hermeneutics; interpretation; the other

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2006) 11, 185–189.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100078

This year I want to set the parameters of my course with the title

‘‘Goings-astray [fourvoiements] in Freudianism’’, or ‘‘Goings-astray

in Freudian thought’’. What I mean by this is that it is not only the

Freudians that I am calling into question, but Freud himself: goings astray of

Freud, and after Freud.

I have recently been described as a revisionist by two voices usually quite

heterogeneous, but at one on this occasion. This term, with its old whiff of

Stalinism, made me smile. I won’t mention any names. I do not accept this

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 2006, 11, (185–189) �c 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1088-0763/06 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs

stigmatization, for what I am trying to do is something other than revision. One

can revise one’s own work, one can revise a text; but revising Freud is not my

concern.

It has been said that I was endangering the balance of Freudian thought,

which immediately raises the question of the kind of balance at stake – of any

thought in general, but of Freud’s in particular. Are we dealing with an edifice, a

perfectly constructed edifice, from which one cannot remove a single wing, a

single brick? Must one, then, accept it in its totality – or risk becoming a

deviationist – just as Aristotelian thought was accepted for centuries, and as

continues to be necessary in certain circles with regard to sacred texts? Is it a

question of being a Talmudist?

Is Freudian thought a perfectly constructed edifice? Must one accept it in its

totality or must one be selective? Of course, neither one nor the other. I would

say, one must understand it in its totality, but one must equally be capable,

precisely by knowing that ensemble, of detecting in it the spurious or unstable

equilibria, the patchings-over, and of trying to prize open the cracks in its

surface.

Freud himself accused his deviationists, such as Jung and Adler – his two great

demons, hardly worthy the honour or the indignity of that name – of stressing

one or the other aspect of his thought in a unilateral fashion. In short, to choose

one aspect of Freud to the detriment of the other, without taking into account

what is signified by both in the totality of his work, is doubtless to take a

thoroughly insufficient view.

So what is it to ‘‘Interpret Freud with Freud’’, to take up the title of one of my

articles? It is certainly not to do a hermeneutics of Freud – that is, to transpose

Freud into another system which might be considered better than his own: an

attempt made by Jung and a number of others; perhaps even, in a certain way,

by Lacan. This would be to forget Freud’s mistrust vis-a-vis any kind of system.

To interpret Freud with Freud is also not to do a psychoanalysis of Freud,

even as it is understood by those who have risked it more or less successfully:2 it

seems to me that a psychoanalysis of Freud would not lead where I want to go.

I think there exists a certain level of interpretation which allows us to follow

the trail of something in Freud’s work which I have for a long time called its

‘‘exigency’’ [exigence]. The exigency is something that is dictated by the object

[objet] neither by Freud the man, nor by logic. In a certain way it is, as in the

psychoanalytic method, the ‘‘unconscious’’ object which orients the very

evolution of the thought. To interpret Freud with Freud, at the level of this

exigency, is to break things down, to adapt mutatis mutandis Freud’s rules of

dissolution, in order to see the parts perhaps recompose themselves otherwise

before our eyes, precisely in accordance with the exigency of the object. It is to

reveal, as in a psychoanalysis, the subterranean movements governing the re-

arrangements above-ground; it is to detect, at certain moments, a crypto-Freud

covered over by the official Freud. I have mentioned more than once how Freud,

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in writing his own history, was very good at covering and embellishing his

tracks.3

What does it mean, to return to sources? A crypto-Freud is certainly not a

proto-Freud. It is not, as with seeking a first Marx or a first Hegel, a question of

going for a first Freud who would be truer than the second. If it could be said

that this first Freud is at certain moments closer to the ‘‘exigency’’, why would

he not coincide with the second at other moments? We are not, then, talking

about a return to temporal sources. Holderlin says that it is in going towards its

mouth that the river approaches its source – a dialectical notion thoroughly

marked by his familiarity with Hegel. Well, this is, in part, the issue; we are not

concerned with exhuming the ‘‘sources’’, an illusory ‘‘first’’, but of uncovering

what it is which constitutes the source [source] and which gets ceaselessly

covered over, like a stream [source] that is suddenly diverted, or drops below

ground only to resurface further on after a subterranean journey. This is what is

at stake: the source of inspiration is nothing other than the object of the search.

I have introduced the idea of going astray, which supposes that the research of

one who goes astray is nonetheless guided by an aim which recurs or insists [un

but qui insiste]. Those who would reach the summit of Everest and who go

astray, suddenly finding themselves at the edge of a cliff, are obviously guided by

Everest, driven on [pousse] by the notion they have of the summit. This

supposes, then, the exigency of arriving somewhere. This supposes, in very

concrete terms, the forked paths, the possibilities of choice, and sometimes the

dead-end routes that present themselves and are taken. And, of course, in the

context of an intellectual journey it is not sufficient to go into reverse, as one

would go back to a crossroads in order to take the right direction, the ‘‘royal

road’’. For when it comes to a thinker like Freud the impasse is never purely

impassable, since the adventurer continues to be guided by his major object; that

is to say – to stick with the image of the mountaineer – when he arrives at an

impassable cliff, he comes to find other paths without necessarily going back to

the fork in the road, always magnetized by the exigency of the summit.

Moreover, it is not a matter of claiming that there is nothing new in Freudian

thought. New discoveries are made with the progress of experience and method,

and these come to complicate the whole. From the moment that a body of

thought, while remaining directed by the exigency of its source–object [objet-

source], is nonetheless engaged in something resembling a major going astray

(perhaps an initial going astray – even though I might be wary about the idea of

anything ‘‘initial’’ in a temporal sense), these patchings-over, intended to

integrate new facts while refinding the direction of the summit, often take the

form of ad hoc hypotheses, which is to say hypotheses invented for the needs of

the cause, in order to try to make the facts accord with a theory which is not

necessarily able to accommodate them.4

To demonstrate a going astray is most certainly to highlight the error, the

wrong path; but it is also to try to expose the causes, and it is here that things get

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Exigency and Going Astray

complicated: no going astray is innocent, and none is without cause; but how

does one get one’s bearings when it is and continues to be the object itself which

is the major cause of the going astray: not only of the true exigency, but also of

the deviations and impasses on the road to truth?

There is a covering-over of the unconscious and of sexuality in Freud’s

own oeuvre, which traces and reproduces the covering-over of the un-

conscious and sexuality in the human being itself. This is something that I

have tried to express in a formula which parodies Haeckel’s law (ontogenesis

reproduces phylogenesis), by stating that ‘‘theoreticogenesis’’, which is to say

the very evolution of the theory with all its avatars, tends to reproduce

ontogenesis, which is to say the fate of sexuality and the unconscious in the

human being.

To this progress of the Freudian oeuvre, and in order to complicate

things, I am compelled to append my own way of proceeding, which I often

describe as a spiral, meaning that I constantly come back to the same points, but

according to a curve which tries as much as possible to go forward, which is to

say to go back to the source of Freudianism while displacing and moving on

from my older formulations (notably, I think, those of Life and Death in

Psychoanalysis (1976)). One could also imagine these spirals in terms of genetic

spirals coiling upward, the one around the other, but I shan’t enter into such

speculations.

What I have proposed to call ‘‘going astray’’ (there are several inter-

connected goings astray – some major, some minor) is born of an almost

inevitable recoiling, which is not to be held against Freud, before

the consequences of the priority of the other in the constitution of what?

of the subject? of the individual? of the person? – why not, but each of

these terms is heavily marked by philosophy. Let us say: of the sexual

human being.

Each of the major goings astray can be clearly defined by that which ensues

from it, by its post-Freudian lineage:

The first going astray, which I will try to designate more precisely,5 and which

is connected with the biologism of sexuality, finds its direct lineage in Melanie

Klein and her disciples.

The second going astray, of which I have already partly spoken with the

‘‘Copernican revolution’’,6 is the autocentrist or ipsocentrist reconstruction of

the human being, which has completely overrun a psychology that claims more

or less to have its roots in psychoanalysis.

Finally, the third going astray consists in situating the structural at the heart

of the unconscious, the lineage of which will be recognized in the structuralism

of Lacan.

There are other goings astray, more or less subordinate to those above –

phylogenesis, the notion of the primordial id – but all this division is quite

artificial; it is principally a way of setting things out.

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Jean Laplanche

About the author

Jean Laplanche is Professor Emeritus of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris

(VII), and a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France. Among his

best-known works are The Language of Psychoanalysis (co-authored with J B

Pontalis) and Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. His most recent major works to

be translated into English are Essays on Otherness and The Unconscious and

the Id. Professor Laplanche is also scientific director of the ongoing project to

translate Freud’s Oeuvres Completes.

Notes

1 Translated from Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualite chez Freud, Paris: Synthelabo, 1993 byVincent Ladmiral and Nicholas Ray (with thanks to John Fletcher of the University of Warwick for

his invaluable comments on the translation).

2 Cf. for example the remarkable works by Anzieu (1986).

3 One example of our way of proceeding towards a crypto-Freud – not an esoteric Freud but the Freudof a subterranean current who gets ceaselessly covered over – can be found in Jacques Andre (2002–

2003).

4 This sense of the term ‘ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis’ is to be found particularly in Popper. A theory,

contradicted by certain facts, can easily be complicated by new hypotheses, instead of being replacedby one simpler and more inclusive hypothesis. One finds such ad hoc hypotheses in Freud’s more

tangled texts. Perhaps the death drive would qualify as an ad hoc hypothesis? Leaving aside its

inventiveness and its openness to new facts, there is also in Freud’s genius the refusal to call intoquestion a certain fundamental going-astray.

5 The detailed exposition of this biologism is what will preoccupy Laplanche for the remainder of Lefourvoiement biologisanty Translators’ note.

6 See Laplanche (1999).

References

Andre, J. (2002–2003). Feminine Sexuality: A Return to Sources. New Formations 48, pp.77–112 (Orig. ‘La sexualite feminine, retour aux sources, in Psychanalyse a l’Universite,1991).

Anzieu, D. (1986). Freud’s Self-Analysis, trans. Peter Graham. London: The Hogarth Press(Orig. L’Auto-analyse: son role dans la decouverte de la psychanalyse par Freud, safonction en psychanalyse, 1959).

Laplanche, J. (1976). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Baltimoreand London: The Johns Hopkins University Press (Orig. Vie et mort en psychanalyse,1970).

Laplanche, J. (1999). The Unfinished Copernican Revolution. In John Fletcher (ed.) Essayson Otherness. London and New York: Routledge. (Orig. La revolution copernicienneinachevee: in La revolution copernicienne inachevee: travaut 1967–1992, Paris: Aubier,1992).

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Exigency and Going Astray