Jean Laplanche contends that the limit to full articulation arrives, not because of a Lacanian “bar” that forecloses the return to a primary jouissance, but because of the overwhelming and enigmatic impressions made by the adult world in its specificity on the child. For Laplanche, there is no Other in some symbolic sense, just the various others who constiutute the caregiving adults in a child’s world. Indeed, for Laplanche there is no reason to assume that these caregivers must be oedipally organized as “father” and “mother.”
Note 19, page 142: Fletcher makes clear that Laplanche’s recourse to the “adult world” as the source of sexual messages is a significant departure from psychoanalytic accounts that assume that an Oedipal scene with Mother and Father structures desire at a primary level. … Fletcher notes that Laplanche’s theory of the “enigmatic signifier” emerges as a clear alternative to the Lacanian symbolic.
This counters the paternal law, linked to the structuralist account of the exchange of women and the universalist premises of “culture,” with a conception of the enigmatic signifier, which assumes not only that primary unconscious and sexual messages are impressed upon the child (constituting the meaning and efficacy of “primary seduction”) but that the primary others who make those impressions are themselves in teh grip of similar messages, which can never be fully decoded or recovered.
Fletcher asserts that Laplanche has clearly inaugurated a psychoanalytic possibility for explaining “those psychic trajectories that swerve from or attempt to rework the normalizing function of the paternal Law and its Oedipal polarities (e.g., various female and male homosexualities).” Although Fletcher does not show us precisely how this might work, he holds out this possibility as following from the displacement of the paternal law by the enigmatic signifier.
Second, he (Fletcher) points to a future project, namely, how to account for gender in the wake of the Oedipus’s displacement from primacy: “What Laplanche’s reworking of the drives in the context of primary seduction now leaves unclear or untheorised, is how the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image (the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers?), the ground or at least terrain from the formation of gendered identities, is now to be rethought”