A good example of this is Freud’s introduction of a “death drive”ein 1919, a controversial and problematic concept if there ever was one. For Laplanche, the seemingly sudden emergence of a totally new conception of the drives was in need of an explanation, to be found in what had been developed by Freud in the previous years. Indeed, based on the reliability assumption mentioned above, Laplanche posited that a change must have occurred somewhere in the preceding formulations, requiring that new concepts make up for the loss or the erasure entailed by that change. Laplanche’s study has shown that Freud’s need for the concept of a death drive indeed resulted from the introduction of narcissism from 1910 on. Narcissism had entailed a sort of conceptual “taming” of the theretofore “demonic” sexual drive, to the point where sexuality was now put on the same side as self-preservation instincts to the point where sexuality was now put on the same side as self- preservation instincts, under the larger heading of “life instincts. Freud’s consistency in his positing the strangeness of the unconscious “thing” required, however, that the demonic aspect be relocated elsewhere in the theory. This was, according to Laplanche, the reason for the introduction of a death drive, in charge of the turbulence of the drives that had been lost of view. An additional historical argument was brought by Laplanche in support of this view. It was discovered in the Minutes of the Vienna Society of the year 1910, where “life instincts” were mentioned nine years before Beyond the pleasure principle , except that they were then situated as the opposite of the sexual drives suggesting that the placeholder for the demonic sexual drives and the death drive was exactly the same. From this example we can see that Laplanche’s method of theoretical/conceptual research requires 1- an extended knowledge of the Freudian theory; 2- an appreciation of the entire structure of the theory so as to detect the equilibria that prevail and which will eventually call for corrective measures whenever a new idea of concept disrupts those equilibria; 3- an epistemological study of the concepts themselves. 7.284%9+.%+#.*-:02(1/4"%+&.%&(#-*+"%/+-'(.24(* ! Laplanche’s method can obviously be applied not just to Freud but also to any other “consistent” psychoanalytic theoretician. Most importantly for our present day situation, it can apply to the study of the impact that post-Freudian concepts have on the Freudian conceptual body taken as a whole. This puts on us an even greater pressure for first carefully examining the elaborate set of concepts that was Freud’s legacy in order to carefully monitor exactly what was added over the years by important post- Freudian authors and how their contributions relate to the original body. Here is an example. In the late 1990’s, while looking for a way of examining virtual reality from a psychoanalytic point of view, my student of the time Marie Leclaire and I were struck that in the vast majority of articles related to “reality testing”. The concept was taken for granted and could be summarized as meaning: “Reality testing is what is lacking in psychosis”, which is a rather poor definition for a concept of such importance. Going back to the origins we were struck by the different definitions Freud had given of “reality testing”, as highlighted by Laplanche & Pontalis in The Language of Psychoanalysis. So, we undertook the task of re-reading Freud on the subject and thereby were able to find that the concept went back to the very beginnings of psychoanalysis and that it entailed in fact precise references to two different kinds of mnemonic traces as well as to a more detailed sequence of mechanisms than was usually assumed. We were thus able to document an “actuality test” as a first step towards a “reality test”. (Leclaire & Scarfone, 2000). Recent work in the IPA’s Conceptual Integration Project Group (CIPG) has taught me many important things about how to examine concepts and their different meanings according to the various theoretical trends and “schools of thought” (Bohleber et al., 2013). The CIPG applied its method to single concepts, but I now think it useful to use it in comparing two or more concepts critically. Hinshelwood (2008) provided a recent example of such comparative study, though his specific method was not the same. His study examined splitting and repression and the result, in my view, well illustrates the interest of conducting comparative work. I believe that combining the methodology developed by the CIPG in the study of single concepts with a comparative method loosely inspired from Hinshelwood one can contribute to the effort of streamlining, so to speak, the conceptual “Babel” of psychoanalysis.
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