Oct 11, 2026

Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process

Conversations Amplifying Differences

Bryan Batista-Thomas

Hosted by Christopher Russell

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Summary

“For Laplanche we are constantly and radically de-centered, always adrift so to speak in terms of a center.” - Dominque Scarfone

“One of the very distinguishing things about Laplanche's work is that it is sort of topsy-turvy. It is this kind of free-floating thing where there's no chronological developmental anything. It's not this sort of cut and dry. – Bryan Batista Thomas

De centered
Adrift
Topsy-turvy
Free Floating
No chronological development

Welcome to a thoroughly Laplanchian conversation.

To write Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process: Conversations Amplifying Differences (Routledge, 2026), author Batista-Thomas presented 9 scholars with 3 clinical vignettes and 14 “Problematized Questions” and then interviewed each one of four to five times. The interviews averaged 75 minutes. He did this to address his “frustration about what I felt was missing in the Laplanchian literature in the United States.”

The result is an extraordinary exploration of Laplanche’s “style” where even the idea that there is a style is called into question.

Here are some of the questions we covered today:

“What does Lorenza Escardó Zaldo mean when she says, ‘we are always trying to push the self-preservative out of the frame’?”

How does Udo Hock answer “where does the repressed come from?” And why does he seem to contradict Luiz Carlos Tarelho?

What are Dominque Scarfone’s thoughts on why presenting clinical vignettes is “an impossible task” that precipitates “infinite digression”?

How do we understand Nicolas Evzonas when he says, “For me, theoretical countertransference determines clinical countertransference”?

And finally, why should both sides of the couch heed Avgi Saketopoulou when she says, “Autonomy has less to do with the availability of more translational possibilities aka a wider mytho symbolic domain and being exposed to/better educated about it and more to do with the capacity to exercise translational variety and not be punished for it.”

In short, what can we get away with?

What must we get away with as we pursue an unconscious “that always eludes us”?

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Christopher Russell

Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. BGSP is the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country. Christopher is primarily interested in new books about Sandor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz.

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