Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture

In a career spanning more than five decades the distinguished French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924 - 2012) elaborated a distinctive methodology for the reading of Freud's corpus and evolved, in connection with it, a radical new metapsychology - one that critically recast Freud's early 'seduction' theory of trauma and placed at the heart of psychic life a particular model of 'enigmatic signification'.Seductions and Enigmas is a volume dedicated to the implications of Laplanche's thought for reading and interpretation.It collects papers that elaborate Laplanche's unique method for the interpretation of Freud, with its attention to the decentering and recentering movements of thought that structure the psychoanalytic field, and explore how the metapsychological developments arising from the implementation of that method open up new horizons for the psychoanalytic reading of other texts and oeuvres in the cultural domain.The volume comprises essays by Laplanche as well as by clinician