Scientific Meeting September 26 | The Enigma of the Other: The Work of Jean Laplanche and the Infinity of the Individual

Scientific Meeting

The Enigma of the Other: The Work of Jean Laplanche and the Infinity of the Individual with Michael Levin, PsyD

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Arbutus Club
2001 Nanton Avenue, Vancouver, B.C.

9.30am – 4:50pm

Over the course of a single day, this seminar offers a comprehensive introduction to the work of Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) — one of the most rigorous and far-reaching interpreters of Freud’s thought, whose own thought has recently been the subject of increased interest in North America. Laplanche’s achievement was to return to Freud’s own texts and, by reading them against themselves, to recover and complete the discovery Freud made and then retreated from: that the unconscious originates in what Laplanche called the enigmatic messages of the other.

The day proceeds in five movements. We begin with Laplanche the man, his intellectual formation in postwar France, and his singular method of reading. We then reconstruct his signature contribution to psychoanalytic thought: The General Theory of Seduction. The third movement takes up temporality, mourning, and identity — including Laplanche’s distinctive account of gender as it follows from his general theory. We turn next to Laplanche’s conceptualization of the psychoanalytic method and treatment: the analytic situation, transference, therapeutic and analytic action, and the aims of analysis. We close on perversion and the conditions of psychic freedom: perversion understood structurally as unconscious ideology and, set against it, psychic freedom rooted in the permanent inexhaustibility of the unconscious in both self and in the other.

Throughout, a single thread runs: that psychoanalysis, at its core, is the discipline sworn to the infinity of the individual — to the person as irreducible to any category, never a specimen of a type, whose singular truth can be met only in the patient work of listening. The seminar assumes no prior familiarity with Laplanche and is designed to be of use to clinicians at every stage.

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Michael Levin, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Mill Valley, California. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Jean Laplanche in 2004 and has continued to study, teach, and write on Laplanche in the two decades since. He is co-author, with Adam Blum and Peter Goldberg, of Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). His broader interests include philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and the dynamic relations of all three in contemporary cultural life.

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Outline

The day is structured as five self-contained lectures of roughly seventy minutes each (lecture plus open discussion), with no breaks apart from lunch.

10:00–11:10
I. The Hermeneutic Creature: Laplanche, His Formation, and His Method

11:10–12:20
II. The General Theory of Seduction

12:20–1:20
{Lunch}

1:20–2:30
III. Temporality, Mourning, and Identity

2:30–3:40
IV. The Clinic of the Other: Situation, Transference, Therapeutic and Analytic Action, and Aims

3:40–4:50
V. Perversion and the Conditions of Psychic Freedom

Learning Objectives: After this presentation, participants can expect to:
1.Describe the core of Laplanche’s General Theory of Seduction — the enigmatic message and the fundamental anthropological situation — and explain how it accounts for the formation of the unconscious.
2. Apply Laplanche’s conception of the analytic process as de-translation to clinical material, including his conceptualizations of transference, neutrality, and the aims of treatment.
3. Distinguish, in Laplanche’s framework, perversion as a counterfeit or foreclosed translation from the psychic freedom that consists in the inexhaustibility of the untranslatable — and relate this distinction to their own clinical work with the singularity of the individual patient.

Cost:
Professional Registrant: $275
WCPSI Member/Community Affiliate Member Registrant: $175
Analysis-In-Training (AIT) / Candidate or Student/Resident/Intern Registrant: $150

Registration closes 1 week prior – September 19th, 2026.

Register