In his introduction to his translation, Luke Thurston writes: The appearance of Laplanche’s The Unfinished Copernican Revolution in English is an event of huge importance not only for psychoanalysis but also for many other spheres of intellectual life. Since his death in 2012, Laplanche’s status as one of the most influential and creative thinkers in the psychoanalytic tradition has been increasingly recognized in the Anglophone world, and his work is now an essential reference in any discussion of the significance and history of the Freudian discovery.… If Laplanche may be beginning, by 2020, to seem like a known quantity, The Unfinished Copernican Revolution will offer plenty of surprises … and for the first time allows the reader to trace the extraordinary development of his work, its consistent concerns and motifs as well as its great reconstellations and leaps forward. What will be no surprise … is that his primary concern—indeed, the mainspring of all his work—is the task of reading Freud and interpreting the complex history of psychoanalytic thought since its inception more than a century ago. But what is always essential for Laplanche is to approach that task not merely as a dry academic exercise but as a contribution to the clinical practice and cultural presence of psychoanalysis in his own time. And it is an affirmation of the presence of psychoanalysis, its continuing life and salience in our societies, that is one of Laplanche’s great accomplishments. He argued passionately against psychoanalysis retreating from the world, sealing itself off in its own bubble of arcane theory, and no longer addressing issues of public significance or contemporary relevance. List of Essays in The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: 1. The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (1992) 2. Defense and Prohibition in Treatment and in the Psychoanalytic Account of the Human (1967) 3. Interpreting (with) Freud (1968) 4. The Originary Position of Masochism in the Field of the Sexual Drive (1968) 5. Notes on Marcuse and Psychoanalysis (1969) 6. The Principles of Psychical Functioning: An Attempt at Clarification (1969) 7. The Derivation of Psychoanalytic Entities (1971) 8. The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic Conditions (1972) 9. The Ego or the Self? (1972) 10. Life Drive: 1910 (1975) 11. Structuralism before Psychoanalysis (1979) 12. A Metapsychology Put to the Test by Anxiety (1979) 13. The Paths of Inhumanity (Regarding the Death Penalty) (1977) 14. Reparation and Penal Retribution: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (1983) 15. Psychoanalysis: History or Archaeology? (1983) 16. Should We Burn Melanie Klein? (1983) 17. The Drive and Its Source-Object: Its Fate in the Transference (1984) 18. Treating Freudian Translation (1984) 19. Trauma, Translation, Transference and Other Trans(es) (1986) 20. The Death Drive in the Theory of Sexual Drives (1986) 21. The Wall and the Arcade (1988) 22. Specific Problems of Terminology in the Translation of Freud (1988) 23. Temporality and Translation: Toward Making the Philosophy of Time Work Again (1989) 24. Debate on “Temporality and Translation” (1989) 25. Implantation, Intromission (1990) 26. Time and the Other (1991) 27. Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics (1991) 28. Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst (1992) 29. Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction (1992) |