Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process: Conversations Amplifying Differences with Bryan Batista-Thomas (Routledge, 2026)

“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’?”