"Essays on Otherness" presents, for the first time in English, a key selection of the work of Jean Laplanche, one of the most important contemporary theorists of psychoanalysis whose work also has crucial implications for post-structuralist thought.
Since Freud's newly controversial abandonment of his seduction theory in 1897, psychoanalysis has given priority to the innate developmental program of the individual over the intersubjective relation to the other person. "Essays on Otherness" shows how Laplanche has returned to and reformulated Freud's abandoned seduction theory as a new theory of primal seduction, intrinsic to the everyday relations of childcare and nurturing. It is through this theory of primal seduction and the original relation to the other, that Laplanche sets a new foundation for psychoanalysis radically centered on the other.

Jean Laplanche is Professor Emeritus of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris, (VII).

Introduction: Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Other; Chapter 1 The Unfinished Copernican Revolution; Chapter 2 A Short Treatise on the Unconscious; Chapter 3 The Drive and its Source-Object: Its Fate in the Transference1Laplanche's title purposely echoes that of Freud's 1915 paper, 'Triebe und Triebschicksale', which appears as 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes' in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1915c), SE XIV, pp. 109-40, translator's note].; Chapter 4 Implantation, Intromission; Chapter 5 Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem; Chapter 6 Seduction, Persecution, Revelation, Jean-Pierre Maïdani-Gérard; Chapter 7 Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction; Chapter 8 Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst; Chapter 9 Time and the Other; Chapter 10 Notes on Afterwardsness1These 'notes' are based on a conversation between Jean Laplanche and Martin Stanton recorded in 1991. They appeared in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, eds John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992, and have been added to and revised by Professor Laplanche for this volume (1998).;