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Since ''l'[[objet petit a]]'' is the object of [[psychoanalysis]], no wonder that we encounter a parallax gap in the very core of psychoanalytic experience. When [[Jean Laplanche]] elaborates the impasses of the Freudian topic of [[seduction]], he effectively reproduces the precise structure of a [[Kant]]ian [[antinomy]]. On the one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of the parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later [[trauma]]s and [[pathology|pathologies]] is that children effectively were seduced and molested by adults; on the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction scene to the patient's [[fantasy]]. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the "realistic" stance, while those who insist on the [[reality]] of seduction end up advocating all kind of molestations, up to satanic rites and extra-terrestrial harassments... Laplanche's solution is precisely the transcendental one: while "seduction" cannot be reduced just to subject's fantasy, while it does refer to a traumatic encounter of the other's "enigmatic message," bearing witness to the other's [[unconscious]], it also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and his/her adults. Seduction is rather a kind of transcendental [[structure]], the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted with the impenetrable acts of the Other which bear witness to the Other's unconscious - and we are never dealing here with simple "facts," but always with facts located into the space of indeterminacy between "too soon" and "too late": the child is originally [[helpless]], thrown into the world when unable to take care of itself, i.e., his/her surviving skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter of the sexualized [[Other]] always, by a structural necessity, comes "too soon," as an unexpected shock which cannot ever be properly symbolized, translated into the universe of [[meaning]].<ref>See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989.</ref> The fact of seduction is thus that of the Kantian transcendental X, a structurally-necessary transcendental illusion.<ref>[[The Parallax View]]</blockquote>
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The "scene of seduction" connotes attempts at seduction, real or fantasied, in the form of advances, incitations, manipulations, or suggestions that are actively initiated by an adult vis-à-vis a child who is passive, even frightened.
The "theory of seduction" was a metapsychological model worked out by Sigmund Freud between 1895 and 1897 and then abandoned; it assigned an etiological role in the production of psychoneuroses to memories of actual seduction attempts. In 1893, bolstered by the accounts given him by his patients, Freud...
[[Category:Terms]]
