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not subjectivity: the “Subject of the unconscious” is preceded by language. The subject is ruled by the symbolic order, an order from which the individual tries to escape through the imaginary formations of the ego, among which stands subjectivity itself. To Lacan, the term unconscious concerns the very idea of how to conceptualize the subject. His whole project is accordingly the study of the unconscious subject . Though Lacan’s definition of the subject may not be the basis of all the contemporary rejection of the relational approaches’ to intersubjectivity, most arguments against it nonetheless revolve around the fact that the discovery of the Freudian unconscious brought about an overall disruption in the notion of subjectivity. Such approach reveals a form of suspicion towards the phenomenological perspective in psychoanalysis. III. Ccb. Metapsychological account of intersubjectivity: Laplanche’s General Theory of Seduction Jean Laplanche extended Lacan’s position of the ‘traumatic real’ more clearly into the intersubjective realm by emphasizing the enigmatic messages that partly originate beyond language and are passed from mother to infant before he/she has the capacity to comprehend them. The enigmatic core defies final explanation and can only be endlessly translated and retranslated throughout life. Here, the analyst-patient relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical and analogous to the primary dissymmetry the patient experienced in infancy. Substituting Freud´s idea of repression with that of translation, Laplanche (Laplanche 1999b, 2011) has paved the way for an inter-subjective explanation of the constitution of the unconscious. In the normal communication between an adult and the child the adult transmits enigmatic messages due to the unconscious of the adult. The child will translate these messages as well as it can. What is lost in translation constitutes the unconscious of the child. Laplanche proposes an original view on the ‘inter-human’ source of psychic life. For Laplanche, metapsychology is not only a conception of the soul: it must account for the therapeutic action of clinical psychoanalysis. Laplanche’s theory is based on the primacy of the other – the historical and concrete adults or older children who take care of the infant – in the formation of the sexual unconscious and of the ego as well (Laplanche and Fletcher, 1993; Laplanche,1999c; Laplanche 2011). The primacy of the other is also a feature of the analytic situation. Though it may look similar to the relational conception, Laplanche’s theory differs substantially from the intersubjectivist/interpersonal paradigm in the following fundamental aspects: 1) The centrality of infantile sexuality in the formation of the human soul, and consequently, in the formation of the unconscious and of the ego as well (Laplanche defines infantile sexuality in a very different way than the classical French approach and also from the Lacanian perspective. This sexuality, insofar as it involves in the sexual unconscious, is not only perverse and polymorphous, but is auto-erotic and primarily masochistic, connected to fantasy and not procreative: it comes prior to the differences of the sexes, even to the differences of gender.)
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