This special issue aims to introduce the English language reader to the more recent work of Jean Laplanche, and to those French psychoanalytic writers who position their arguments in some relation to it. The essays gathered together here continue the development of Laplanche's theory of primal seduction, and the work of resituating and relocating classical Freudian concepts and debates; including a meditation by Laplanche himself on the theory of sublimation. There is a reformulation of the problematic of parental "primal scenes" by Jacqueline Lanouziere, in relation to the mother-child couple and the experience of breast-feeding; a return to classical debates on female sexuality by Jacques Andre; a further elaboration by Dominique Scarfone of the primal situation of transmission, seduction and translation; and a return to the problematic of the "primal fantasies" in Freud from Guy Rosolato.