Essays on Otherness presents, for the first time in English, a key selection of the work of Jean Laplanche, one of the most important contemporary theorists of psychoanalysis whose work also has crucial implications for post-structuralist thought.
Since Freud's newly controversial abandonment of his seduction theory in 1897, psychoanalysis has given priority to the innate developmental program of the individual over the intersubjective relation to the other person. Essays on Otherness shows how Laplanche has returned to and reformulated Freud's abandoned seduction theory as a new theory of primal seduction, intrinsic to the everyday relations of childcare and nurturing. It is through this theory of primal seduction and the original relation to the other, that Laplanche sets a new foundation for psychoanalysis radically centered on the other.