Laplanche's study of Hoelderlin is not only the early work of one of Lacan's most brilliant students, one who, in contrast to the large majority of students of such a powerful master, was able to work through the unavoidable transference to gain his own stature and independence, it is also a response to a text that pursued in the most rigorous manner the dissociation of life and work, the work as the most radical consummation of the life from which it emerges. from the Introduction by Rainer Naegele First published in French in 1961, Jean Laplanche's Hoelderlin and the Question of the Father remains the single most important study of the relationship between the poet s literary production and the profound psychic distress to which he eventually succumbed. By following Lacan's hypothesis concerning the etiology of psychotic illness, the theory of the foreclosure of the paternal signifier, Laplanche is able to situate Hoelderlin's poetry at the place where in modernity the writer is compelled to struggle in new ways with fundamental questions concerning tradition, authorization, autonomy, originality, and the vitality or deadness of a language that is never simply one s own. Laplanche's study is finely tuned to the distinctive patterns of Hoelderlin's psychic life, above all in the period from 1794 to 1800 when his singular poetic voice was in the process of emerging. One must be grateful to Luke Carson for making this volume available to a new audience of readers. --Eric Santner, Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, University of Chicago JEAN LAPLANCHE is among the most important and influential French psychoanalytic theorists of the last thirty years. Works available in English include: Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins); New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (Basil Blackwell, 1989); Essays in Otherness (Routledge); and with J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Norton). RAINER NAEGELE is Alfred C. and Martha F. Mohr Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University. In addition to many books in German (including three on Hoelderlin), his books in English include: Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts ; Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (both published by Johns Hopkins); and Reading after Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hoelderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud (Columbia).