Call for Papers 6th Vol.
CALL FOR ENTRIES 6TH EDITION OF PATHOS
Call for entries valid from 3/04/2024 to 14/07/2024
REPETITION
The psychoanalytic technique is built on the basis of the interest, from the beginning, in the treatment of the symptom. Not only did obstacles to such treatment arise with the use of hypnosis, but the technique of free association also showed impediments to access those conditions that gave rise to the current suffering, since instead of a memory, the repetition of an act, of a past fragment, appears. This is taken by Freud as a resistance, which he explains by means of the mechanism of repression, whose intolerable content for the ego remains unconscious and therefore is not remembered.
The psychic apparatus, then, sets itself the task of recovering a sign of satisfaction through the mnemic traces, in the form of a memory, which carry out the journey from the original satisfaction; due to the effect of repression something is forgotten, so that remembrance, as a counterpart of this mechanism, is on the side of the return of what has been repressed. However, Freud clarifies that there are elements that were never conscious and therefore have not been reached by repression, so that one cannot remember that which was never forgotten.
After the turn of the twentieth century, the aftermath of the war opens a new field of psychic manifestations such as traumatic dreams, negative therapeutic reaction, infantile fixations, the game of "Fort-Da", which are explained under a new orbit.
The new pulsional classification places the death drive as a demonic force that perpetually and violently attacks the psychic apparatus, in a compulsive movement of repetition that seeks pleasure for one of the systems (unconscious) even if this implies displeasure for another (consciousness). This drive tendency, more original than the pleasure principle which it dethrones, is put into action in the transference in the form of the eternal return of the same.
In Lacan's elaborations, it already appears in the first seminars the recognition of repetition linked to the signifying chain, in the sense of an insistence that seeks to determine what the subject is around his lack, by means of the knowledge that would come from the field of S2; that is to say, repetition is closely related to what the subject represents as a term excluded from the chain, which he tries to recover all the time in the signifying articulation. Repetition has a symbolic character that presents itself within the S1-S2 loop; and precisely the impossibility of trapping that signifier that names the being of the subject, implies the constant insistence of the chain that produces this repetitive effect.
At the point of Seminar XI he points to the failure of repetition related to the temporal element of the unconscious. As a failed encounter, repetition does not point to the inscription of a real impossible to capture through the signifiers (automaton), but on the contrary refers to that element of imperative insistence that never manages to be found (tyché). Repetition, then, is postulated as an articulating concept between the signifier and the real, and therefore as a cleavage between the Automaton and the Tyché.
In Seminar XVII he proposes knowledge as repetition, connected to the loss and recovery of jouissance from an economic perspective; in this seminar the S1 is related to an empty place that will allow the production of the object a. It is the insistence of the S1 that is not connected to any S2, and in this constant misencounter a loss of jouissance is produced that will lead to its recovery through the object a. This object, as a plus of jouissance, is what produces repetition, being linked both to knowledge and to truth.
From this path we can recognize how repetition is linked to the conception of the subject, to the register of the symbolic and the real, to transference, to jouissance, to the object a, making clear its assembly in the vast psychoanalytic construct.
The sixth issue of Pathos magazine invites us to work on the theme of one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: Repetition, recognizing in the elaborations on this concept, new academic contributions, new balances of knowledge that continue in the orientation of the clinic as well as of psychoanalytic theory.
We invite you to write for this new issue in its two modalities, free paper and dossier, under the following thematic axes: repetition and symptom, repetition and fantasy, repetition compulsion, the two statutes (tyché and automaton), repetition and jouissance, repetition and signifier, the end of analysis and repetition.
