“His Majesty the Ego”: From Freud to Laplanche (and

back)

John Fletcher

Jean Laplanche has written at length on the

theory of the ego in Freud’s work, on its

complexities and its contradictions. This includes

his extensive analysis of its conceptual profile at

the different stages of Freud’s thought as laid out

in the lengthy entry under ‘Ego’ in Laplanche and

Pontalis (1967, pp. 130-143). There is also his

elaboration of the ego’s relation to the vital

order and to narcissism in the first two chapters

of Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). Finally there

is his long meditation on primary narcissism and

the ego in the as yet untranslated final volume of

lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in the

Problématiques series: Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité

chez Freud (1993). Laplanche argues against the

assumption that it was only with The Ego and the Id

(1923) and the formulation of the second topography

that a systematic theory of the ego as agency

1

(Instanz) of the psychical apparatus was developed,

whereas previous uses of the term referenced the

self or individual as a whole1; as evidenced for

example in the editorial note in the Standard Edition

to Freud’s 1914 paper on narcissism. Laplanche

demonstrates that, on the contrary, the existence

of an agency called ‘the ego’ within the psychical

apparatus is assigned the function of inhibition of

the primary processes in the Project for a Scientific

Psychology of 1895 (Laplanche 1970, pp. 48-65). This

argument of Freud’s is central to Laplanche’s

conception of the ego.

1. The Ego and its Double Derivation

Laplanche also demonstrates the tension verging

on contradiction in Freud’s treatment of the ego,

in the second topography, between what I will call

a ‘realist’ conception of the ego as an organ of

adaptation of the id to the demands of the external

world, centred on the perception-consciousness

system, and so a representative of the ‘reality

principle’, on the one hand, and on the other, an

1 ‘[A]t first he used the term [“das Ich”] without any great precision, as we might speakof “the self”; but in his latest writings he gave it a very much more definite and narrowmeaning’ (‘Editor’s Note’, Freud 1914: 71).

2

ego conceived of as an internal libidinal object,

made up synthetically of potentially conflicting

identifications with other persons. It is to this

latter perspective of a ‘libidinal genealogy’ of

the ego, of its formation in relation to the drives

and their transformations, that Laplanche’s

treatment of the ego in the framework of the

general theory of seduction is affiliated. In

particular, it is the theory of narcissism proposed

in Freud’s 1914 paper “On Narcissism: An

Introduction” that Laplanche builds on, with its

distinction between an auto-erotism of the sexual

drives [Triebe and not instincts] in the moment of

their first appearance as such, and a later primary

narcissism of the ego. That distinction was

unfortunately effaced by Freud’s subsequent

reformulation of primary narcissism as an

undifferentiated, objectless primal state,

‘implying no split between subject and external

world’, ‘which is epitomised by life in the womb’

(Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 338), from which state

the little solipsistic monad would - somehow –

3

awaken: a late Freudian conception against which

Laplanche has consistently argued.

In 1914, however, Freud had postulated a

‘primary and normal narcissism’ that would be ‘the

libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct

of self-preservation’ (Freud 1914c, pp. 73-4). He

then poses the question: ‘what is the relation of

the narcissism of which we are now speaking to

auto-erotism, which we have described as an early

state of the libido?’ His reply is cryptic but

pregnant, as he responds by invoking the theme of

the ego and its origin:

I may point out that we are bound to

suppose that a unity comparable to the ego

cannot exist in the individual from the

start; the ego has to be developed. The

auto-erotic instincts [Triebe – drives],

however, are there from the first; so there

must be something added to auto-erotism – a

new psychical action - in order to bring

about narcissism (Freud 1914, pp. 76-7).

For all the richness of his development of the

problematic of narcissism in the essay, Freud never

4

specifies what this ‘new psychical action’ might

be. However, by twinning the development of the ego

with the transformation of auto-erotism into

narcissism, he strongly implies that the one

entails the other.

A few years earlier in the Schreber case, Freud

had proposed narcissism as a ‘half-way phase

between auto-erotism and object-love’ (Freud 1911c,

p. 61). In this phase ‘by taking himself, his own

body, as a love-object’, Freud argues, the

individual ‘unifies his sexual drives [Triebe]

(which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic

activities)’ (ibid., 60). In the Schreber case

Freud’s focus had been on the object-relation. Here

in 1914 the unification of the hitherto independent

and fragmented auto-erotic drives, dispersed around

the different erotogenic zones of the body,

coincides with the formation of an ego, a ‘unity’

that, as he has said, ‘cannot exist in the

individual from the start’ (Freud 1914c, p. 77). By

implication the narcissistic unification of the

drives in a single libidinal object constitutes the

ego as such. However, it is only in the later text,

5

which delivers the second topography, The Ego and the

Id, that the origin of the ego is explicitly

located in the formation of a body schema, as ‘the

mental projection of the surface of the body’: the

ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not

merely a surface entity, but is itself the

projection of a surface’ (Freud 1923b, p. 26). So

while a series of heterogeneous elements are

assembled across a number of Freud’s texts - the

auto-erotic drives and their unification, the

narcissistic investment of the body, the body-

surface entity and its projection (to which one

could add the mechanism of identification and the

process of sublimation from the third chapter of

The Ego and the Id) – nevertheless, the ‘new psychical

action’, that would produce the unity of the

narcissistically constituted ego as agency from out

of the primordial body-ego and its auto-erotic

drives, is never explicitly elaborated as such.

A number of later psychoanalytic theories of

the ego can be seen as attempts to take up Freud’s

unfulfilled promissory note and to specify the

nature of that ‘new psychical action’. Lacan

6

famously proposed the mirror phase, in which the

infant, in a state of uncoordinated nursling

dependency, anticipates its future bodily coherence

and mastery in an imaginary unity through an

identification with the image of its specular

counterpart in the mirror ‘ [T]his gestalt ...

symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same

time as it prefigures its alienating destination’

(Lacan, 1949, p. 76). Lacan attributed to this

fictional self-representation the function of

anticipatory misrecognition with regard to the

infant’s biologically premature state of non-

coordination, and also of resistance with regard to

the unconscious and the drives. He opposed it to

any conception of the ego as ‘centred on the

perception-consciousness system or as organized by the

‘reality principle’ (ibid., p. 80).

However, it is Didier Anzieu who develops

Freud’s notion of the ‘body-ego’ into a ‘skin-ego’

as both tactile surface and mental projection, at

one and the same time a containing sack of inner

contents, a protective barrier against external

impacts, and a psycho-physiological receptor of

7

excitations and messages from the mother. Here in

Anzieu’s words ‘the massage becomes a message’

[Anzieu, 1985, p. 39], an apt approximation to what

Laplanche was later to call the pre-verbal

enigmatic signifier, itself both massage and

message. Anzieu’s skin-ego thus constitutes the

necessary set of psycho-physiological preconditions

for anything like Lacan’s specular drama with the

mirror image to take place. The skin-ego also plays

a part in Laplanche’s ambitious attempt, in the

framework of the theory of primal seduction, to

model the ‘new psychical action’ that would

transform the auto-erotic drives, and the

polymorphous perverse, libidinal body of the infant

they infest, into the narcissistically constituted

ego, the antagonist of those very drives.

Laplanche points out that Freud’s term Instanz

has a juridical connotation in German as well as in

French, such that the derivation of the ego as

Instanz from the psychobiological individual implies

both the formation of an agency and the notion of a

delegation of powers to that agency from the larger

whole from which it derives (Laplanche 1993c: 81-

8

2). He situates the derivation of the ego as agency

from the whole individual in Freud’s thought within

a double perspective: the derivation by contiguity

(as in the trope of metonymy) and the derivation by

similarity (as in the trope of metaphor).2 So a

double derivation of the ego, at once metonymic and

metaphoric. This double derivation is not simply

the evident existence of two alternative or

contradictory conceptions of the ego in Freud’s

thought, a metonymical ego as distinct from a

metaphorical ego; rather, Laplanche argues, there

is a double derivation of a single ego, which is

not just a derivation of concepts but an actual

lived derivation of a psychical entity along two

paths of formation that intersect (Laplanche 1993,

p. 83). The contradiction between ‘realist’ and

‘narcissistic’ concepts of the ego would then be

the theoretical symptom of partial and successive

attempts to grasp the complexity of that combined

and lived derivation.

2 This double perspective is reprised in contemporary structuralist thought from theprinciples of the association of ideas and the classical tradition of rhetoric. Laplanchesets it out systematically in relation to psychoanalysis in ‘Derivation of PsychoanalyticEntities’, reprinted as an appendix to the English translation of Life and Death inPsychoanalysis (Laplanche, 1970).

9

2. The ego as metonym

The relation between the ego-individual and the

ego-as-agency in the first instance would be a

metonymical one of contiguity: the ego is a

specialised organ in which are localised certain

functions performed on behalf of the whole. In

Freud’s ‘ego psychology’ and its later developments

these operate under the rubric of adaptation to the

external world. Its genesis Freud argues, is by way

of a differentiation of the surface of an organism

due to the impact of external reality on its

receptive apparatus, the perception-consciousness

system, which in 1923 Freud called the nucleus of

the ego (Freud 1923b: 23). The ego’s development is

in a metonymical relation of contiguity with the

whole organism (the psychobiological individual) of

which it is a part. This differentiation thesis is

a causal one (as in the model of the vesicle with

its receptive surface and protective shield in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud’s description of

this modification of the surface of the body-id

10

into the ego under the impact of external forces

leads him to his further claim that ‘the ego seeks

to bring the influence of the external world to

bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours

to substitute the reality principle for the

pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in

the id’ (Freud 1923b, p. 25). However, this

differentiation thesis doesn’t entail or support

the accompanying representation thesis that the ego

‘represents’ the demands of external reality,

although Freud attempts to suture the two claims

together with the succeeding proposition that ‘for

the ego, perception plays the part which in the id

falls to drive [Trieb]’ (ibid, p. 25). This

equivalence or substitution of the perception of

external realities for the internal force of

instinct or drive is a category mistake, and as

Laplanche observes, ‘This would mean that in

psychical conflict an intrinsic force is attributed to

reality. It is not so much the ego that acts

through its own energies ... as the real itself

which seems to play the role of a veritable agency’

(Laplanche 1970, p. 53). The ego’s task of

11

dominating and adapting the id and its drives to

the demands of the external world is at this point

entrusted by Freud to the force of perception

itself (a profoundly un-psychoanalytic

proposition). It is as if the supposed

differentiating effect of external perception in

the formation of the ego were the guarantee of its

sufficiency or efficacy in mastering the drives.

3. The ego as metaphor

The metaphorical derivation of the ego is by way

of an image or representation of the whole

organism. Strikingly this also emerges from the

receptive surfaces of the perceptual apparatus, in

the very same passage I have been drawing on at the

close of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id where Freud

derives the ego’s status as the representative of

the reality principle. Thus, in Freud’s cryptic

formulation, ‘The ego is first and foremost a

bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but

12

is itself the projection of a surface’. This is

elaborated briefly in a footnote to the English

translation authorised by Freud, ‘the ego is

ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly

those springing from the surface of the body. It

may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the

surface of the body’ (Freud 1923b, p. 26). So by

allusion to the bodily apperception through which

“a person’s body attains its special position among

other objects in the world of perception” (Freud

1923b, p. 25), Freud passes from the body as agent

of perception to the body as object of its own

perception, that is, to the body-ego as

simultaneously percipiens and perceptum. As the mental

projection of the body surface and its sensations

the ego is no longer, Laplanche argues, ‘conceived

of as a prolongation of the living individual but a

displacement of it, and of its image, to another site,

and consequently as a kind of intrapsychical

reality, an intrapsychical precipitate formed in

the image of the individual’ (Laplanche 1970, p.

53). In other words the movement of Freud’s thought

has taken him from the metonymic conception of the

13

ego as an outgrowth and dependency of the

perceptual system, via the notion of bodily

apperception, to what is a metaphoric conception of

the ego as intrapsychic projection. This projection

is a representation, a simulacrum of the body with

its surfaces and boundaries, but one located, as

Laplanche argues, in another site, in an interior

topography, a psychical ‘apparatus of the soul’ (in

Freud’s formulation a Seelischer Apparat). From

paragraph to paragraph Freud segues from the

metonymic to the metaphoric conception by way of a

conceptual slide from perception to apperception.

The ghost of the ‘new psychical action’ of

1914, the term ‘projection’ is used oddly here. In

its strict psychoanalytic usage it refers to a

defensive expulsion of mental contents, their

relocation in an external figure or object, while its

neurological usage refers to the internal transfer of

sensations from peripheral nerve endings to the

spinal chord. (In the neurological sections of his

1893 paper on organic paralyses, Freud

differentiates between the relations of

‘projection’ that obtain between the periphery and

14

the spinal chord and the relations of

‘representation’ that obtain between the spinal

chord and the cerebral cortex). However the

projection of the body surface Freud is here

talking about operates from the body surface to the

interior unlike psychoanalytic projection. It is,

nevertheless, not neurological but rather ‘mental’

or psychical. It is, furthermore, posited entirely

in a perceptual register, as in the realist

conception of the ego, and with no reference to the

libidinal dynamics that constituted the field of

operation of ‘the new psychical action’ of 1914.

The realist ego was to master and adapt the drives

by the sheer force of its perceptions of external

reality that somewhat implausibly were to ‘play the

part which in the id falls to drive [Trieb] (Freud

1923b, p. 25). Freud doesn’t elaborate on the

nature or functions of this intra-psychical

projection of the body surface, except to make a

passing analogy with the cortical homunculus that

maps the different areas and organs of the body

onto the brain. Freud’s projected body-ego or

psychical homunculus, like its cortical twin, remains

15

confined to the perceptual register and the central

mapping of peripheral organs with their sensations

and perceptions and the pathways they traverse (and

with the substitution of perception for drive as

the supposed energy source of the ego).

It is not surprising that the body-ego

disappears without trace when, resuming his

argument in the following chapter 3 of The Ego and the

Id, Freud proceeds to his account of the building

up of the ego through identifications with external

figures and the libidinal transformations which

that entails. Here in chapter 3 of The Ego and the Id

the starting point of this identificatory process

is said to be, not the primitive body-ego, but the

individual’s first identification with ‘the father

of his personal prehistory’ (ibid: 30), leading to

the formation of the ego ideal. Freud makes no

attempt to articulate these different elements in a

single system or model, although it is possible to

see the intra-psychic projection of the surface

body-ego, with its internal mapping of a

preliminary boundary or containing envelope, as

that interior site to which successive

16

identifications might be delivered and on which

they might perform their identificatory work of

assimilation.

The heart of the metaphorical derivation as

laid out by Laplanche lies in the ego as an intra-

psychical ‘projection’ of the primitive body or

skin ego, invested as a libidinal object. Freud’s

starting point in ‘On Narcissism’ in 1914 had been

the transformation of the multiple, auto-erotic

component drives into a unified libidinal

organisation centred on a single object the ego,

the first unified love-object. Thus

narcissistically constituted, the ego becomes a

permanent reservoir of libido from which

investments are sent out to particular objects and

withdrawn back from them into the ego in the form

of secondary narcissism:

Thus we form the idea of there being an

original cathexis of the ego from which some

is later given off to objects but which

fundamentally persists and is related to

object-cathexes much as the body of an

17

amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which

it puts out. (Freud 1914c, p. 75)

This gives an account of the ego in terms of

libidinal dynamics, but what is missing is a way of

relating its formation and functioning in the

libidinal register of the drives to the parallel

account of the ego in terms of the register of

perception (where Freud had substituted external

perception for the drive); whether metonymically,

as the recipient of perceptions and representative

of the external world, or metaphorically, as the

simulacrum projected inwards of the apperceptive

body surface.

4. The Ego as love-object

Laplanche’s account of the ‘new psychical

action’ that forms narcissism and the ego works

across both these two registers. He draws on

Lacan’s model of the mirror-stage (which is

formulated almost entirely in terms of the

perceptual register, albeit concerned with self-

18

perception) and he reworks this for his own notion

of an identification with a gestalt of the whole

body as a total object. Lacan’s classic paper of

1949 poses this in terms of the formation of a

unified body-image and its organisation of the

subject’s relation to his uncoordinated bodily

functioning (and as a relation of alienation and

misrecognition) with only a passing reference to

the libidinal dimension. Laplanche sees this

identification with a totalizing gestalt as a

precipitation and binding of the auto-erotic

drives, dispersed around the body’s multiple

erotogenic zones, into a new libidinal and

representational unity. He argues that there isn’t

a temporal priority of primary narcissism over the

narcissistic object choice which in Freud’s order

of presentation comes afterwards: “primary

narcissism isn’t anything other than narcissistic

object choice” (Laplanche 1993c, p. 94, my

translation), i.e. primary narcissism is the

concentration of diverse auto-erotic drives,

hitherto anchored in specific zones, in a unified

object (here the body-image), formed in the image

19

of the whole individual. The very formation of the

ego as agency is the primal narcissistic object

choice:

Narcissism, on this basis, is the love of

the ego; the love of an ego itself

precipitated by love, in the same moment as

the love for the form of its counterpart

[semblable]; an ego precipitated in the same

moment that the living being attaches itself

to the image of its counterpart; a loved ego

invested with libido, Freud tells us, and so

becoming, he adds, ‘a great reservoir of

libido’. On the other hand, the ego is

‘binding’; it binds, it is by definition

totalising and acts so as to hold together,

to assemble all the auto-erotic drives and

at the same time to contain them; it acts to

contain the auto-erotic by enclosing it, by

totalising it, but also exercising over it,

laterally, from the margins, an effect of

moderation and control (Laplanche 1993, pp.

94-5, my translation).

20

As with the metonymic conception, here the role of

perception is also central, but rather than a

neutral reception of incidental sense data from any

old external reality, the perception involves a

libidinally driven identification with the

containing form or outline of its specular

counterpart. This may be either reflexively

perceived in a literal mirror as in Lacan’s

exemplary instance or in the mirror of the other

(especially the other who addresses the infant with

its nurturing but enigmatic messages). As Laplanche

elaborates, ‘narcissism is a Gestaltung, a giving of

form to auto-eroticism, entailing a profound

mutation of sexuality, by the fact that the

narcissistic action, the precipitation or

narcissistic coagulation, binds that sexuality’

(ibid., p. 99, my translation). The function of

binding here is the other side of the movement of

enclosure and totalising of the component drives

into an organised, invested whole body image. The

effect of this binding is of a moderation and

control of drive movements, exercised laterally,

from the margins.

21

5. The Ego of the Project

Laplanche derives this function of binding from

Freud’s first systematic theory of the ego as an

agency of inhibition, in the unpublished Project for a

Scientific Psychology of 1895. In Laplanche’s extensive

commentary on the early model of the ego, he

demonstrates its affinity with the later metaphoric

derivation, rather than with the ‘realist’,

metonymic derivation of the ego. While the

‘realist’ ego is plugged directly into external

reality through the perception-consciousness

system, having a privileged or at least

unproblematic relation to that reality in The Ego and

the Id, by contrast the ego of the Project is

established quite independently of the perception

system (the system on the external periphery of

the psychical apparatus). As Laplanche points out,

the ego is only introduced into the model after the

operation of perception has been established, along

with the process of recognition of the reality or

non-reality of revived perceptual traces.

22

The problem that Freud addresses in this

section of the Project is that when the revived

perceptual traces are intensely cathected they

override the signals of correspondence with a real

object (the ‘indications of reality’ in the

consciousness system), and so they take on the

force of hallucination due to the intensity of the

cathexis. However the problem is not dealt with in

1895 by granting the ego a special relation to

reality, or by elevating perception to the status

of an internal force comparable to the drives, as

Freud is later to do in 1923. Rather Freud posits

the ego as a bound form invested with drive energy

from the unconscious system: ‘let us picture the

ego as a network of cathected neurones well

facilitated in relation to one another’ which

‘corresponds to the vehicle of the store required for the

secondary process’ (Freud 1950a [1895]: 323). This

operates an attractive field of force on adjacent

neuronal pathways, inhibiting the passage of drive

energy by drawing it into itself. So if the ego is

threatened by the intensely cathected revival of a

memory trace of a painful experience, or of an

23

hallucinatory perceptual trace whose discharge

would lead to an experience of dissatisfaction due

to the absence of the corresponding object (e.g. a

lost love-object), it can deploy the side-cathexis

of adjoining neurones to capture the passage of

drive energy for its own system. This inhibiting

action of the ego is explained by Freud entirely in

economic terms as the action of a gestalt on its

surroundings by virtue of the difference in their

energy levels. As Laplanche comments: “There would

be a kind of induction in the surrounding field,

similar to that exercised by an electrically or

magnetically charged mass, the induced effect being

a function of the energy difference between the

inducing element and the environment’ (Laplanche

1970, p. 63).

The nucleus of the ego here in this early

account is not at all the perception-consciousness

system, but is rather the permanent stasis of

energy in the bound but internally facilitated

gestalt of the ego. (By “internally facilitated”

Freud means that energy flows are evenly

distributed between the elements or ‘neurones’ that

24

constitute the nucleus of the ego and they sustain

it homeostatically at an optimum level for its

functioning, separate from its surroundings). It is

the operation of this mass as a field of attractive

force that lowers or even abolishes the highly

charged movements of hallucinatory memory traces,

and so allows the quite separate perception and

consciousness systems with their indications of

reality to function. As Freud concludes, “It is

accordingly inhibition by the ego that makes

possible a criterion for distinguishing between

perception and memory” (Freud 1950a [1895], p.

326). However this inhibition is not a function of

the ego’s privileged access to reality or of the

formation of the ego around the perception system.

On the contrary, the ego is an object formed within

the unconscious system by “the regularly repeated

reception of endogenous Qn [energy or quantity] in

certain neurones of the nucleus” (ibid, p. 323).

This inhibition and capture of adjacent highly

charged drive movements anticipates the idea

formulated in the third chapter of The Ego and the Id,

that the ego’s control of the drives takes place

25

through the regression from object-choice to

identification. Freud calls this, “a method by

which the ego can obtain control over the id”:

When the ego assumes the features of the

object, it is forcing itself, so to speak,

upon the id as a love-object and is trying

to make good the id’s loss by saying, “Look,

you can love me too – I am so like the

object”. (Freud 1923b, p. 30)

Here, in a further development, the ego as a

libidinally charged form, both bound and binding,

is established through identification with renounced

love-objects and the recapture of the investments

previously made in them. Freud generalises the

process, first described in ‘Mourning and

Melancholia’ (1917) as a mechanism specific to

melancholia: we have an identificatory process that

constitutes the ego through the introjection of a

lost or renounced loved object: “it makes it

possible to suppose that the character of the ego

is a precipitate of abandoned object-choices and

that it contains the history of those object-

choices” (ibid., p. 29). The price for this,

26

however, as Freud points out, is an ‘acquiescing to

a large

extent in the id’s experiences’ (ibid., p. 30). An

ambiguous form of control, then, that is scarcely

distinguishable from capitulation to the id and its

drives.

It is a recognition of this paradoxical and

equivocal status that informs Laplanche’s

conception of the ego in its metaphorical-libidinal

derivation. Laplanche draws out the implications of

this conception, starting from the Project, that the

ego is not “essentially a subject”. “[I]t is

neither the subject in the sense of classical

philosophy, a subject of perception and

consciousness (it is not ), nor the subject of

wishing and desire ... but a specific formation

within the mnemic systems, an internal object

cathected with the energy of the apparatus”

(Laplanche 1970, p. 66). However, the ego is a

paradoxical kind of object that acts and ‘enters

into conflicts as a participant by virtue of its

double function: an inhibitive function or a

function of binding ... and a defensive function”.

27

An object that acts, a kind of proxy, a pseudo-

subject: “the ego is indeed an object, but a kind

of relay object, capable of passing itself off, in

a more or less deceptive and usurpatory manner, as

a desiring and wishing subject” (ibid., p. 66). As

Freud recognizes in his famous metaphor of the

rider and the horse, a metaphor that starts off

intending to exemplify control of the id but ends

up in acquiescence: “Often a rider, if he is not to

be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it

where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is

in the habit of transforming the id’s will into

action as if it were its own” (Freud 1923b, p. 25 my

italics). So the ego is an internal object, in

Laplanche’s striking formulation, passing itself

off as a subject of wishing and desire.

6. The Ego between perception and drive

However the question of perception is not

entirely banished from the developed metaphorical-

narcissistic conception of the ego. The relation of

the ego to perception was at the heart of the

28

realist conception and it intersects with the

narcissistic conception at this very point. It is,

however, a special and original perception at stake

here, not just routine perceptions of the external

world and its objects, but both apperception or self-

perception, and the perception of the other, i.e.

perception in the charged context of a formative

inter-subjective relation. Freud had alluded to the

role of self-perception in his transition from the

metonymic to the metaphoric conception in the final

pages of chapter 2 of The Ego and the Id:

A person’s own body, and above all its

surface, is a place from which both external

and internal perceptions may spring. It is

seen like any other object, but to the touch

it yields two kinds of sensations, one of

which may be equivalent to an internal

perception. Psychophysiology has fully

discussed the manner in which a person’s own

body, attains its special position among

other objects in the world of perception.

(Freud 1923b, p. 25)

29

It is only in a much earlier recognition in the

Project, but later well forgotten, that Freud

acknowledges the foundational force of the

perception of the other:

Let us suppose that the object that

furnishes the perception resembles the

subject – a fellow human-being. If so, the

theoretical interest [taken in it] is also

explained by the fact that an object like this

was simultaneously the [subject’s] first

satisfying object and further his first

hostile object, as well as his sole helping

power. For this reason it is in relation to

a fellow human-being that a human-being

learns to cognize (Freud, 1950a [1895], p.

331).

The first object of perception-cognition is the

semblable or counterpart, the “fellow human-being”, the

one who is like me, so that this perception is

implicitly an apperception. Furthermore, Freud

attributes the interest in cognizing to the fact

that this counterpart is also like the first

satisfying and the first hostile object, as well as

30

the “sole helping power”. The perceptual complex

proceeding from the fellow human being, Freud tells

us, “falls apart into two components, of which one

makes an impression by its constant structure and

stays together as a thing” (ibid., p. 321), while

the second component is variable. While some

aspects will be “new and non-comparable”, e.g. the

facial features, others – e.g. the movements of the

hands - will recall memories of the subject’s own

body and it experiences (ibid: 321). In this

account perception of the other is supported and

made intelligible by apperceptive experience of the

subject’s own body. Indeed Freud proposes a

wholesale analogy between the structure of the ego

and the structure of the object of perception and

cognition. The perceived object is divided by

judgement into the constant thing and its variable

predicates, which matches the distinction between the

“nucleus of the ego”, internally charged with a

constant level of energy, and “the changing

cathexes in the pallium” – the word “pallium” in

Freud’s neurological language refers to the

neurones that receive excitations from the

31

perceptual apparatus. (ibid, p. 328). It’s not

clear, however, what the implications of this

analogy are: whether the infant projects the

structure of the ego onto the object as its

structure or whether he receives this structure

from the other - as a Vorbild or model for the

nascent ego, ‘projected’ inward from the body

surface to its internal site. Laplanche’s theory of

seduction would propose that it is the vector

coming from the other that is prior and this

elicits or provokes both the subject’s perceptual

and libidinal responses to the other.

My argument is that Freud locates the very

initiation of the perceptual apparatus, and the

subsequent development of the faculties of

judgement and remembering, in a metaphorical

reference back to what Laplanche calls the

situation of primal seduction, with its satisfying

and hostile objects and its “sole helping power”,

that is, the nurturing and seductive adult other.

In the context of the theory of primal seduction,

that perceptual complex that comes from the other

is not just a set of neutral “indices of

32

perception” (the Wahrnehmungszeichen or first

elements given to perception that Freud talks about

in the letter to Fliess, 6th December, 1896); rather

the initiating perceptual complex constitutes what

Laplanche calls “perceptual signs”, “originating in

the sender of the message, they make a sign in a

double, linked sense – they acquire the force of

signs and this is because, isolated by the sender,

they are addressed to the subject” (Laplanche 1992,

p. 74). The role of this enigmatic signification

from the adult other in the provocation of the

infant’s primal translation-repression, with the

consequent formation of the drives as its by-

product, has been set out at length in Laplanche’s

New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (especially chapter 3)

and various essays in Essays on Otherness (Laplanche

1999a) and his last volume of essays, Sexual, to be

published in English later this year. I have

commented at length on it in my editorial

introduction to Essays on Otherness and in a recent

essay on the Theory of Primal Seduction in

Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Fletcher, 2007).

33

7. Primal repression and the formation of the Ego

Freud’s privileged primal perception or

perceptual complex proceeding from the fellow human

being (whether satisfying, hostile, supportive, or

all three), when set in the framework of

Laplanche’s seduction theory, takes on the force of

an enigmatic signifier or sequence of signifiers that

target and address the infant recipient. Facial

expressions, gestures, intonational patterns, these

pre-linguistic signifying elements are Laplanche

argues “embedded in the periphery of the ego ...

implanted in the periphery of the individual, and

primarily in the points known as erotogenic zones’

(Laplanche 1987: 135). Laplanche is describing here

what he calls the first stage of a primal repression

that is, overall, correlative with the formation of

the ego and has vital implications for its

precipitation in a narcissistically invested form.

The ‘ego’ that receives and registers these primary

perceptual signs is Freud’s body-ego, Anzieu’s skin

ego, co-terminous with the whole individual as its

receptive surface. What Anzieu says of the tactile

34

skin surface perceptions – ‘the massage is a

message’ (Anzieu, 1985, p. 39) - applies across the

whole sensorium and, as Laplanche argues, the

message is both a message of care, support, love

but one that carries an enigmatic, repressed,

inchoate sexual dimension on the part of the adult.

What is pertinent here is Laplanche’s taking up

and elaboration of the translation model of

repression that Freud sketches out in the letter to

Fliess that I cited previously. There Freud

proposes that psychic structure is formed through a

process of stratification by which memory traces

are laid down not once but several times over,

through a series of rearrangements or

retranscriptions that represent successive epochs

or phases of development. Freud wrote to Fliess on

6th December, 1896:

At the boundary between two such epochs a

translation of the psychic material must

take place. I explain the peculiarities of

the psychoneuroses by supposing that this

translation has not taken place in the case

of some of the material ... Every later

35

transcript inhibits its predecessor and

drains the excitatory process from it. If a

later transcript is lacking ... thus an

anachronism persists ... A failure of

translation – this is what is known

clinically as “repression.” (Masson 1985, p.

208)

In Laplanche’s model of translation-repression,

developing that of Freud, for every act of

translation or carrying across and binding of

exciting material, there is also a partial failure

of translation. Something is not carried across and

remains unbound. The later transcript that

“inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory

process from it” is the germ of the idea of

sublimation (Laplanche develops this in his recent

return to the concept of sublimation, Laplanche

1999b), while Freud explicitly identifies the failure

of translation with repression. Both the concepts

of repression and sublimation are re-positioned by

Laplanche in relation to the translation model. In

Laplanche’s elaboration of the model of

translation, it is the repressed, untranslated

36

remainders of the enigmatic messages from the other

that form the nucleus of the unconscious as a

separate system. He calls these elements of the

primal repressed ‘de-signified signifiers’ and

‘source-objects’, i.e. they are signifying elements

that have lost their signifying function and

original context in the other’s discourse and

expressiveness and have become reified, reduced to

a ‘thing-like’ status in the unconscious. As such,

they press towards expression and discharge in the

form of the drive. Rewriting Freud’s terminology,

Laplanche also calls them ‘source-objects’,

signifying objects from the other that have been

fragmented, remaindered, repressed and thereby have

come to function as the source of the drives.

In the second stage of primal repression,

Laplanche writes, the ego-as-agency is formed, the

‘projection’ or transferral inwards of the

excitable and receptive surfaces of the body-ego in

a bounded self-representation. Where in the first stage

the enigmatic signifier was external, ‘embedded in

the periphery of the body-ego... primarily in the

37

points known as erotogenic zones’, in the second

stage:

The enigmatic signifier or, to be more

precise, its repressed residue, the source-

object, becomes internal; it is still

external to the ego, or embedded in its

periphery but, given the ego is more

restricted than the whole individual ... it

is an internal-external element which, as

far as the ego is concerned, acts from the

outside. (Laplanche 1987, p. 135)

(ES=enigmatic signifier, SO=source-object

Figure 3.3, Laplanche 1987, p. 135)

However, we have not considered the actual

translation process itself, the successful carrying

across of the excitatory elements into a new phase

of development, and the new ‘language’ that

attenuates and binds them (as in the letter to

38

Fliess on translation). Here we encounter once

again from a different angle the question of

Freud’s ‘new psychical action’ and its synthesising

of the auto-erotic drives into the narcissistic

ego. As I have argued, this requires the

articulation of its libidinal register with the

projection of the body surface into intrapsychic

space as the ego-agency, and the recognition that

that body-ego is infested with exciting

implantations that map and zone its surface. This

projection of the erogenized and auto-erotic

surface into a narcissistically loved and

boundaried body image also comes to perform a

defensive function against what resists translation

and binding, what cannot be translated, but which

seeks to return; for the ego forms an internal

periphery or protective barrier against the attack

of the drives, the excitations of the internal

foreign body (the object-become-a-source) of which

Laplanche writes: ‘a kind of internal-external instance

has been formed: a “thorn in the flesh” or, we

might say, a veritable thorn in the protective wall of

the ego’ (Laplanche 1970, p. 42, my retranslation of

39

Laplanche’s word épine, where Mehlman has ‘spine in

the flesh’). It reminds me of Lacan’s suggestive

neologism for an interiorised exteriority: extimité,

not the intimate but the extimate.

Laplanche models the different levels of the

ego and the repeated moments of their precipitation

as a series of envelopes - body surface, skin ego,

introjected ego-agency. These enfold each other in

parallel. Psychically actualised metaphors of the

whole individual, they are not, however, just

metaphors floating in inner space, for the

successive envelopes coincide at certain points of

tangency. In Laplanche’s various diagrams they

intersect tangentially, sutured or stapled

together, as it were, by ‘the thorn-in-the-flesh’,

that is, by the privileged traces and zonings of

the erotically implanted body. The body and the

ego, Laplanche argues, are articulated together at

the point of impact of the drive, where those

‘later transcripts’, the sublimated counter-

investments, inhibit and drain its excitations

(Laplanche 1980a, p. 228).

40

(Figure 3.2, Laplanche 1987, p. 134)

It is with this carrying across or translation

of the ego as a centred form with its untranslated

remainders or source-objects that we can see the

ego’s double and combined derivation:

The second stage of primal repression concerns

the

nascent ego-as-agency; the ego-agency is part of

the

apparatus, and it is made in the image of the

whole.

It is therefore a metaphor for the biological

whole, but

it is also an organ of the whole and it exists

within a

metonymic contiguity with the whole.

(Laplanche, 1987: 134).

8. Narcissism and the other

41

The moment of the ‘new psychical action’, with

its unifying projection inwards, happens

spontaneously in Freud’s account, as if it were the

next stage of a developmental programme. In Lacan’s

mirror stage schema it appears also as a

spontaneous development (at least in the classic

1949 paper), anticipating in the imaginary

dimension what is to come and thereby implementing

the organising function of the body schema.

Laplanche’s model of primal seduction, however,

would require a more specific motivation for this

development than the general defensive function

performed by the ego of an internal periphery

against the drives. Laplanche’s theory with its

other-centred, ‘Copernican’ perspective prompts the

question: what action of the other offers the

infant a libidinally invested, bound form as a

model or prototype for its ‘new psychical

projection’?

An intimation is given in ‘On Narcissism’. Here

Freud’s distinction between the different modes of

object choice, the so called ‘anaclytic’ and the

narcissistic object-choices, collapses. The

42

distinction collapses because the donation of

narcissistic libido to all objects, however derived,

whether chosen on the model of the ego or on that

of the parental support, emerges as the general

libidinal formula for all object choice. “Parental

love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish,

is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again,

which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably

reveals its former nature” (Freud, 1914c: 91). The

action of parental love, donating its revived

narcissism to the infant, is detectable, Freud

argues, in the idealisation and overvaluation of

the infant in the parents’ eyes, in their

conscription (can one use Laplanche’s term

‘seduction’?) of the infant to the parental fantasy

that Freud calls ‘His Majesty the Baby’:

Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe

every perfection to the child ... to suspend

in the child’s favour the operation of all

the cultural acquisitions which their own

narcissism has been forced to respect, and

to renew on his behalf the claims to

privileges which were long ago given up by

43

themselves. The child shall have a better

time than his parents ... he shall not be

subject to the necessities ... Illness,

death, renunciation ... shall not touch him;

the laws of nature and of society shall be

abrogated in his favour. (Freud 1914c: 91)

Then in a rhetorical climax as theoretically

pregnant as it is ironic - Freud concludes:

He shall once more be the centre and core

of creation – “His Majesty the Baby”, as we

once fancied ourselves. (Freud 1914c: 91)

Freud’s wry insider’s evocation of parental fantasy

– “he shall once more be the centre and core of

creation” - points the way to the ‘Ptolemaic’

movement of self-centring, with its closure of the

infant’s psychical apparatus on itself, and its

repetition “once more” of parental self-centring.

While Freud’s description of parental fantasy stops

short of a proper theoretical elaboration of its action

and effects, nevertheless, we can see that what is

at stake here is a ‘narcissizing’ effect of

parental fantasy, whose action thereby - almost like

a performative in speech act theory - implants and

44

implements a seductive, libidinally charged ‘centre

and core’ in the infant. The Standard Edition’s helpful

footnote refers Freud’s ironic titling of parental

fantasy to a well known Royal Academy painting of

“His Majesty the Baby” in which two policemen

suspend the stream of city traffic to allow a

nursemaid to parade a pram and baby across a busy

street (Freud 1914c: 91). The Standard Edition

editors reference Freud’s later reworking of the

painting’s title as a formula for authorial self-

projection in daydreams and popular fiction: ‘His

Majesty the Ego’ (Freud 1908e, p. 150). Freud’s

ironic repetition of the honorific royal formula

indicates his awareness of the inter-connectedness

of the two themes, the parental fantasy of ‘the

Baby’ - en majescule as it were – and ‘the Ego.’ The

parental fantasy of the baby, as a protected and

defended ‘centre and core’, thereby centres the

libidinally fragmented and dispersed infantile skin

ego in the narcissistic unity of the loved

simulacrum. The parental fantasy of ‘His Majesty

the Baby’ lays down for the infant, who is seduced

and conscripted to it, a template or Vorbild that

45

thereby models the later accession and coming to

power - the crowning and enthronement - of ‘His

Majesty the Ego’.

Surprisingly there is very little in

Laplanche’s work that directly addresses the

specific centripetal action of the adult other and

its narcissizing impact, which would provoke and

support the synthesising processes of primary

narcissism on the part of the infant. However,

Laplanche’s most recent work on gender identity

(Laplanche 2007) has argued that the infant’s

acquisition of gender identity through

identification with the parent can only be explained

by the prior identification by the parent of the

infant as belonging to one of two genders. The

infant is assigned to and identified as belonging

to a gender and it is only this identification by

the other that provokes and enables the child’s

identification with the other.

The same argument clearly obtains with the

primary identification with the adult other that

Freud invokes in The Project. The adult fantasy

addressed to the infant both provokes and supports

46

an identification with either the specular

counterpart in the mirror or the form of the

“fellow human-being”, an identification that

internalises the delimiting form and outline of the

primary self-representation. However any account

framed purely in the perceptual, metonymic register

is inadequate, because the libidinal dynamic that

invests that form and that provides the ‘drive’

that impels the identification must also be

accounted for. Along with the Laplanchean principle

of the primacy of the other, this requirement of a

libidinal dimension calls out for a further

theoretical elaboration of the action of parental

narcissism and its narcissizing fantasy of ‘His

Majesty the Baby-Ego’ within the framework of the

theory of primal seduction.3

Postscript on Narcissism and Freud’s Two Theories of the Drives

‘The movement of the concept repeats the movement

of the object of the concept’, Hegel3 The late Sylvia Bleichmar, a former student and colleague of Laplanche’s, had begun suchan elaboration (Bleichmar, 2000) with her concept of maternal narcissisme transvasant (self-emptying narcissism) that allows part of itself to become other in the infant’s own body(le corps propre).

47

Laplanche sometimes summarizes thus an aspect

of Hegel’s thought that he finds congenial, as a

way of dramatizing both Freud’s repeated movement

of ‘going-astray’ (fourvoiement, a term he raises to

the level of a methodological concept) and his own

way of interpreting Freud’s going-astray. This is

an oscillation in thought from an other-centred or

‘Copernican’ break from self-centring to a

‘Ptolemaic’ recentring. Indeed he parodies Freud’s

fondness for invoking Haeckel’s Law (ontogenesis,

the development of the individual, repeats

phylogenesis, the development of the species), with

‘Laplanche’s Law’, ‘Theoreticogenesis, which is to

say the 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’ (Laplanche, 1993c: 188). The fate

in question is a covering over, an elision, an

absorption into something else, both at the level

of theory and of individual psychic formation.

Laplanche traces such a movement from the first

theory of the drives, turning on the relation of

leaning-on and deviation between self-preservation

48

with its instinctual functions and the sexual

drives (in short, between Instinkt and Trieb), to the

second theory of the drives, which posits a real

opposition between the Life ‘Instincts’ or Eros and

the Death ‘Instincts’. Here, despite Freud’s

massive recourse to the biological, in effect to

Instinkt, he speaks of Lebenstriebe and Todestriebe.

Laplanche argues that the sexual drive of the first

theory is not to be mapped onto the ‘Life

Instincts’ or Eros of the second theory, which

would have left an incommensurate, indeed

incoherent parallel between self-preservation and

the ‘Death Instincts’. In fact Eros represents the

collapse or conflation of the Trieb/Instinkt

distinction in Freud’s thought, what Laplanche

calls the colonization of self-preservation by Eros

and the consequent absorption of both it and the

sexual drive into Eros:

I remain convinced that the shift from one

dualism to the other in Freud is in no sense

the substitution of one system for another

less valuable system. It corresponds to

something in the reality of the human being:

49

the movement from one to the other

corresponds to the birth of something, the

transition between two states or positions .

. . This would imply that the first dualism

would pre-exist the second in the reality of

human existence, indeed would constitute its

very foundation (Laplanche, 1999b, pp. 34-

5).

Laplanche argues that beneath the incommensurate

pairings of the two theories there is an underlying

consistency, which he represents in the form of

what he calls a “strange chiasmus”:

50

(Laplanche, 1970, p.124)

Laplanche’s diagram dramatizes both the apparent

anomaly by which sexuality moves from the pole of

the primary process, free energy in the first

theory to the pole of the secondary process, bound

energy and the ego in the second theory, and the

underlying consistency of the opposition of unbinding

and binding that organizes these pairs of

opposites. To these one can add further Freudian

opposites, such as the pressure towards absolute

discharge and homeostasis. I would argue that the

cross-over point of Laplanche’s strange chiasmus

that is unnamed on his diagram, where the sexual

drive cross over into its opposite, Eros, is in

fact primary narcissism.

This is the moment of ‘the new psychical

action’, which this paper has been so concerned

with: the internalization from the other of the

bound and binding form that coagulates the auto-

erotic component-drives of infantile sexuality into

51

the unified narcissistic libido. This constitutes

the ego as the first totalized love object and as

the libidinally invested representative of the

self-preservative functions that, henceforth, it

encloses. Laplanche draws a further implication

from Freud’s disinclination to propose a ‘destrudo’

as an independent energy source for the Death drive

to match the ‘libido’ of the Life drive, ‘For the

death drive does not possess its own energy. Its

energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive

is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of

libidinal circulation’ (Laplanche, 1970, p. 124).

The death drive is then the return of the Trieb, the

unbinding and unmaking pressure towards discharge,

first elaborated in the Three Essays of 1905, the

great ‘Book of the Drive’. It is, Laplanche argues,

this alternative regime of the sexual, ‘Lucifer -

Amor’ (Masson, 1985, p.421), which is re-affirmed

in 1920 as an exigency of the Freudian field and

its object, the ‘apparatus of the soul’, in the

face of the massive elaboration of the principle of

binding, of narcissism and all its works from 1914

onwards. It is, however, the Life ‘Instinct/Drive’,

52

the heir of that narcissistic cross-over and its

‘new psychical action’, Laplanche concludes, not the

death drive (‘known of old and long familiar’ like Das

Unheimliche, the Uncanny of 1919), that is Freud’s

new invention, the great surprise of 1920.

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