ABSTRACT
Jean Laplanche turns first to psychiatry then to psychoanalysis both as a practitioner and as a theoretician. The path that he followed is above all an internal trajectory, characterised by a quest that would lead him to challenge all kinds of received ideas. In May 1968, he participated in freeing the clinical human sciences from the hegemony of experimental psychology. As far as clinical practice goes, however, the author seems to manage with transference-love, at any rate when it is contained within non-psychotic limits. If one accepts that the fundamental dimension of transference is the relation to the enigma of the other, perhaps the principal site of transference, 'ordinary' transference, before, beyond or after analysis, would be the multiple relation to the cultural, to creation or, more precisely, to the cultural message. Among the kinds of transference which exist 'before' analysis, the author has accorded a privileged place to the multiple relations to the cultural, taken in the widest sense.
