The Theory of the Generalized Seduction and its corollary, the theory of the translation

It is in 1987 when, in the book "New foundations for the psychoanalysis", Jean Laplanche developed his "theory of the generalized seduction" by taking back what Freud had abandoned in his neurotica of 1897. Laplanche, about the text of Ferenczi on the "Confusion" of the languages between the adults and the child considers that the term of translation would be more suited than that of confusion but also that Freud did not develop the effects of the premature communication and the message. Now it is from the interhuman communication between an adult and a child within the "Fundamental Anthropological Situation" that the author places the genesis of the psychic device and it, independently of any biological substratum. And so the enigmatic messages which-from the sexual unconscious of the other adult-ask for a work of translation of the infans, for work the not translatable unconscious rests of which will become that Jean Laplanche names the "objects-sources" of the drive at the origin of the repression. The child of the pregenital sexuality is the only one "hermeneute", who has to translate the enigmatic messages compromised with the unconscious of the other adult. From this point of view, the "theory of the generalized seduction" is also a theory of the afterward. We present two clinical cases which show how Jean Laplanche's theory allows us to welcome the clinical material by considering the work of the patient as a event of translation-symbolization from a reopening facilitated by the experiment of the psychoanalytical situation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.