Kierkegaard repetition an essay in experimental psychology pdf download

Haufniensis' distinction emphasizes the idea that insofar as human beings can no longer look for the eternal truth in the immanence of their being, it is the case that the alternative is an approach to transcendence, that is to say, the transcendent category of repetition. Haufniensis is here reiterating in a different formula what Constantius had said in Repetition: When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence.

If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise R The play of opposites is thus among Constantius' techniques, and it is understandable how the work reaches out to the reader in order to allow the category of repetition to take hold, as it were, in a dialectical way.

Yet in this failure, it is possible to see the contrast with repetition, to which the young man aspires and achieves — at least in his own interpretation — by accident.

With all of this in mind, let us turn to a detailed examination of recollection in Repetition. To my easy chair. A heartfelt longing comes over me for you, Thou sun of women R The poem is patently nostalgic — a concept we will return to — as though recollecting something that happened long ago, encapsulating its object as the highest of all women, as though all women could be taken in at a glance in the being of this one eminent woman.

He has managed to reflect himself into an poetic illusion, and has forgotten that he is still living. The young man, in his fervor, has raised his beloved to the skies, idealizing his whole love into a recollecting poesy that by its very nature totally eclipses his life as he is presently living it. Our sense that the young man has already reached the recollection of old age is confirmed by Constantius when he observes that it would make no essential difference at this point if the young woman actually died, for the young man has suddenly elevated the relationship above the contingency of her existence.

The sense of melancholy and longing in Kierkegaard's work is worth elaborating at this point, insofar as it occupies an important place in his Christian existentialist discussions of the individual confronted by a paradox that bars the way toward what has an infinite interest for him or her.

Whether this interest is the consummation of erotic love, as in the case of the young man, or the eternal happiness represented in the Christian promise of salvation, the paradox of seeking the genuinely transcendent makes itself felt as a demand for sacrifice. Although Johannes Climacus admits that it is an imperfect metaphor, he notes that erotic love faces a paradox that is analogous to the absolute paradox which Christian faith sets over and against the understanding.

The happiness of erotic love begins with self-love, for which the beloved is but an occasion. In the love of poetic recollection, the young man is sufficient unto himself, and yet this self- love, of which his poesy is an expression, cannot become genuine erotic love without willing itself into a confrontation with the paradox that it is an illusion in relation to the beloved.

In order to remain in the self-sufficiency of poetic recollection, the lover must acknowledge that the beloved will disappear as an occasion. In order to move toward erotic love, self-love must will its own downfall. The poetic love must somehow renounce its self-contained, timeless perfection and fall to loving the imperfect, actual beloved, without losing the ideality of thought which began the movement and remains at the heart of erotic love.

As Climacus says: Self-love lies at the basis of love, but at its peak its paradoxical passion wills its own downfall. Erotic love also wills this, and therefore these two forces are in mutual understanding in the moment of passion, and this passion is precisely erotic love [ Despite his new poetic consciousness, the young man knows that what he is doing is in some sense wrong. He feels a guilt at making the girl the object of such a deception, and yet he does not understand why his poetic transformation should make him guilty.

The young man is effectively enmeshed in a paradox: he loves her, but he does not love her. He is somehow offended that this should become a problem, and feels that somehow he has been wronged. He must affirm his love in relation to her imperfection, and yet in his poetic state, it is precisely this that he cannot do. Thus the young man feels this impossibility as a guilt of some kind, the consciousness of some sin offends the purity of his new poetic consciousness.

In the suffering of this misunderstanding, the young man continues to write to Constantius even while he has fled the scene, as it were. The universal, for Kierkegaard, is the ethical norms that a community assents to insofar as they are an ethical community.

This concept is given its most elaborate treatment in Johannes de Silentio's Fear and Trembling, in which Abraham's teleological suspension of the ethical raises him above the ethical universal in a relation of faith with God FT In the context of the young man's situation in Repetition, the universal is manifest in the ethical requirement to marry the woman who returns his love. The young man finds himself in an exceptional position with regard to this ethical norm, and indeed Constantius tells us that all poets constitute such an exception R It is clear at this point how an individual, in a confrontation with the demands of the ethical in this case marriage , can hit upon a paradox that brings with it a religious passion for the apparently absurd resolution of his or her conflict.

The young man, in his letters, pines away and finds comfort only in Job, whose long-suffering faith is nonetheless unshaken by the ethical conflict his friends believed precipitated his suffering. Job believes he is innocent, and right with God, and waits for the repetition.

He receives everything back twofold, and this is what the young man is waiting for, though a great deal less tacitly. He attains it, but instead of being made a husband, it is granted to him to become a poet. When he receives word of her marriage, he writes to Constantius that he is himself again, that he has attained repetition, and that he has been given what he loved more, namely, a poetic existence.

Constantius explains: He keeps a religious mood as a secret he cannot explain, while at the same time this secret helps him poetically to explain actuality. He explains the universal as repetition, and yet he himself understands repetition in another way, for although actuality becomes the repetition, for him the repetition is the raising of his consciousness to the second power R Yet as soon as the conflict with the ethical demand is resolved, the young man falls back into the position of one for whom recollection is enough.

His exceptional status in defiance of this demand has been sanctioned by the actuality of the girl's marriage, and he keeps the momentary religious earnestness and passion of his suffering as a secret he cannot explain. Kierkegaard and Lacan both posit a division in history between the time when recollection was believed to be sufficient to place one in a true relation with the eternal, and the modern conception that must forge its way by virtue of repetition.

But in light of this division, it is important to note that the efficacy and draw of recollection as a means of putting oneself in a relation with the eternal — even if this relation is not in truth, but in illusion or poesy — is still an active approach beyond the time of the Greeks. Recollection has been posited as the Greek response to contingency, but for the Greeks, according to Kierkegaard, there was no choice, since that time preceded the advent of Christ and his teaching that human being is untruth in relation to the eternal.

For Kierkegaard, it is only in the religious passion that the individual can will repetition by virtue of the belief — absurd to all heretical understandings — that for God all things are possible. In the chapter that follows, I will explore what meaning this division has for Lacan, in his reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Seminar II, Lacan gives his interpretation of Kierkegaard's division as a point of contact with a Freudian perspective on the need for repetition: Freud distinguishes two completely different structurations of human experience — one which, along with Kierkegaard, I called ancient, based on reminiscence, presupposing agreement, harmony between man and the world of his objects, which means that he recognises them, because in some way, he has always known them — and, on the contrary, the conquest, the structuration of the world through the effort of labour, along the path of repetition.

To the extent that what appears to him corresponds only partially with what has already gained him satisfaction, the subject engages in a quest, and repeats his quest indefinitely until he rediscovers his object II The latter, as we shall see, is a structuration of signification that is not only external to and determinative of the human individual, but which also has the potential effect of binding the individual in a compulsion that exerts its force from beyond the subject.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle In page Seminar II, Lacan opposes the need for repetition to the mechanics of equilibrium with which the pleasure principle is associated. The economic function of the pleasure principle is to discharge psychic excitation along the shortest route possible, that is, to release the excitation and give rise to satisfaction, which Freud understands as a quantitative reduction of tension. As Lacan puts it: From the beginning of Freud's work to the end, the pleasure principle is explained in the following way — when faced with a stimulus encroaching on the living apparatus, the nervous system is as it were the indispensable delegate of the homeostat, of the indispensable regulator, thanks to which the living being survives, and to which corresponds a tendency to lower the excitation to the minimum II This process is referred to as the primary process, which in brief can be described as an unreflective process of wish-fulfillment associated with the unconscious — a complex association that will need to be explained — for which the mere perception of an object which has been effectively satisfying in the past is enough to produce that satisfaction again.

What is problematic about the primary process is that it is content to hallucinate an object — producing of itself a unity of perception — that will give rise to satisfaction. So it is in any situation where the subject lacks the object in actuality the expediency of the pleasure principle will cause ever more tension, inasmuch as a lack of actual satisfaction can only ever be pacified imaginatively via hallucination. Thus Lacan interprets Freud's position with regard to a second principle, which serves in turn to regulate the first: If the sequence of experiences has hallucinatory effects, there must be a correcting apparatus, a test of reality.

This test of reality presupposes a comparison between the hallucination and something which is given in experience and preserved in the memory of the psychic apparatus II This secondary process is governed by the reality principle, according to Freud, which as a principle of reasoning allows the subject to mentalize the aim of satisfaction and bear a certain amount of tension until either the corresponding object can be attained or a suitable substitute can be found.

What is presupposed at the level of the secondary process is the mechanisms of recollection or reminiscence against which the reality principle is able to distinguish between the successful and unsuccessful researches of the past. With experience, the subject learns where success is to be found on the level of psychic reality and where attempts at attaining satisfaction have failed, and thus with the secondary process regulating the first there is the capacity for an ever more perfect adaptation to the environs in which subjects find themselves.

With the paper entitled Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan tells us that Freud came to a point when his clinical experience forced him to posit a force in human life that does not obey the more or less co-operative order of the primary and secondary processes.

Lacan reads here that there is something fundamentally different about human beings, as compared with animals, who seem to adapt readily to their environment.

As he says: The dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of anything which progresses through adaptation, through approximation, through being perfected. It is something which proceeds by leaps, in jumps. It is always the strictly inadequate application of certain complete symbolic relations, and that implies several tonalities, immixtions, for instance of the imaginary in the symbolic, or inversely II At a certain point, it becomes obvious to Freud that the pleasure principle has in some way ceased to function as the principle of attaining pleasure, and any investigation into this anomalous malfunctioning must be directed toward the unconscious with which the primary process is associated.

In brief, what is discovered to be beyond the efficacy of the pleasure and reality principles — as a system of restitution and recollection — is a phenomenon of repetition that does not have a restitutive or adaptive function, but rather repeats aspects in the life of the subject indefinitely, in some cases causing a disturbance that on the one hand serves no adaptive function, and on the other, doesn't appear to resolve itself through a conceptual domestication of the stimulus.

It is this repetition beyond the adaptation of the psychic apparatus that Freud calls Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion to repeat. Indeed, Freud expresses the strangeness of the fact that serious physical injury can actually counteract the traumatic symptom development during the experience of a life-threatening event. Moving toward an explanation of this phenomenon, Freud makes a distinction between anxiety, fear and fright that is illuminating.

So it is only when a subject is taken by surprise in some near-fatal calamity, and is not seriously injured by it, that the phenomenon of war neurosis develops.

The most interesting symptom of traumatic neurosis, for Freud, is the exception it seems to prove in his theory that all dreaming is a form of wish- fulfillment.

The dreams of someone who has developed a traumatic neurosis seem to bring them back to the scene of the trauma over and over again, without thereby resolving the fright and in fact creating a new one upon awakening Freud The theory of dreams as wish-fulfilling is thus doubly challenged, insofar as first the return to the original scene does not prove helpful for the discharge of the frightful tension, and second, the fright upon waking suggests that the subject is actually awakened by the traumatic dream, thus demonstrating that the function of the pleasure principle in dreaming which serves to keep the subject asleep is somehow broken by the recurrence of the trauma.

Freud goes on to suggest two motivations for the game. These kinds of repetition stem from a form of repression in the unconscious that insists on its realization, so although the ego finds them quite unpleasurable it seems that these repetitions are actually still a source of pleasure at the level of the unconscious.

Freud is working with a topographical model that places the perception-consciousness system Pcpt. With reference to this model, trauma is defined as the result of an excessive amount of external stimulus breaking through the protective barrier of the Pcpt.

The function of dreams for traumatic neurosis thus takes on this latter function, insofar as in dreams the psychic apparatus hopes to return to the event of the trauma in an attempt to produce the anxiety retroactively that would have prevented the traumatic neurosis in the first place Freud In the case of the traumatic neurosis, we can assume that instinct would drive the psychic apparatus to re-establish a state prior to the traumatic event.

The sexual instincts which prolong life, in this picture, are really only a postponement of death, and thus it is towards death that all life aims. He relates the death drive to his own theory of the symbolic order, insofar as he believes the specifically human problem of the compulsion to repeat has a basis in the symbolic structuration of human reality.

The new set of circumstances in which we discover humankind enmeshed is thus defined by the fact that [Freud] cannot find the slightest tendency towards progress in any of the concrete and historical manifestations of human functions [ Lacan stresses that once this extraneous and insistent aspect of human psychic life is discovered, the understanding of human development cannot return to the idea that human beings are naturally situated on a progressive path toward ever more perfect forms.

If the subject is driven to discover what is obscure in their actions and motivations, then it is through a recognition of the subject's compulsive repetitions — the paradoxical and painful manifestations of the unconscious — that will have to lead the way. Thus, in the modern subject, something unharmonious, something maladaptive presents itself. What is made apparent is that a human being at a certain point can no longer be understood to operate under the auspices of some progressive development toward the good, as in the dyadic Platonic model.

At this point, something should be said about the Lacanian notion of the human individual as situated in relation to the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, terms he uses to advance a theory of human life as necessarily structured.

But perhaps these numerals have as much an ordinal as a cardinal value. As structurations of human being, the imaginary and the symbolic are intertwined in the individual's taking up and responding to the real, which is defined by Lacan as that which has no fissure, no gap or hiddenness, no absence. He asserts in Seminar II that human beings have always given the real the same meaning: It is something one always finds in the same place, whether or not one has been there.

This real may have moved, but if it has moved, one looks for it elsewhere, one looks for why it has been disturbed, one also tells oneself that sometimes it moves under its own steam II The unadulterated experience of the real is often traumatic, as when one witnesses a senseless death, or sees the body of a loved one cut open on the operating table as though it were an indifferent hunk of meat.

It is not the case that all experiences of the meaninglessness of being are so traumatic, but we will see what importance this has for the concept of repetition in psychoanalysis.

The captative effect of the infant's mirror image has the effect of fascinating the subject and thereby locking him or her in an endless dialectic between the anticipation of an ideal and his or her present insufficiency in relation to it. In anticipation, it is the fullness of my ideal reality that I look forward to, the future as yet withholding its promise, and the present appears merely as its insufficient preamble, a passing time of frustration that I would have pass all the more quickly the greater the prowess I imagine for myself.

This profound alienation of the subject in relation to the ego is further compounded by the determinacy of the symbolic order, which has for Lacan a definitively determinative relation with the human individual.

Langue is the homogeneous and traditional system of linguistic signs which subsists within a community and only changes slowly over time. This macro level of language, which can be codified in dictionaries and the like, is comprised of linguistic units that are commonly accessible to all members of a language community. Finally, we can describe Saussure's sense of parole as the individual speech act of the individual, as a particular instantiation of his or her langage in a specific time and place.

These two aspects have a mutual relation as parts of a whole the sign and while this relation is subject to change in the individual langage, it is concretized in the homogeneous system of a community's langue Ibid.

The interrelation between the signifier and the signified can thus be conceptualized as one of opposition, and this alternation of meant and meaning which is susceptible to shifts on the level of langage and parole can never be totally separated from each other.

In general terms, the signifier is conceived as indicating the signified, and in the practice of speaking, Lacan argues that this relationship of indication actually constitutes the signified in an important sense. This places the relation between the individual and the words and sentences the individual uses to speak about him or herself beyond the individual's control.

Language subsists beyond any particularization of itself in speech, and as such constitutes the alien field within which the individual must negotiate recognition for his or her imaginary ego. In a sense, I must conceptualize and objectify myself as some thing that can be spoken about in general terms. Compounded with the alienation of the split between the subject and the ego, this gives rise to a variety of conflicts.

The individual must negotiate within this field of language not only for the sake of fulfilling his or her wants and needs, but also for a sense of his or her identity as an ego appearing in the intersubjective order. Unconscious Thought Returning from these brief clarifications to the problem of repetition, we should note the way in which Lacan characterizes the Freudian discovery of unconscious thought as the discovery of the workings of the symbol in dreams.

Though Freud never discussed unconscious thought in terms of the symbolic order that Lacan articulates with the help of structural linguistics, it is this discovery which Lacan believes is his original contribution.

Lacan conceives this unconscious operation within human psychic life as a unique combinatorial function that has its own rules of organization problematically unknown to the subject and which manifests as an insistence, especially within dreams. It is in this sense that a kind of machination comes to characterize certain aspects of human tendency, a machination that has its source in an embodied mystery of meaning that — like time — structures human psychic life.

Just as the clock stands all by itself, ticking away the time as an embodiment of a mysterious operation — somewhere between the observable movements of the heavens and an artificial structuration of their progress — so too the unconscious functions as an autonomous mental operation in which the symbolic order abides by its own rules, the results of which cannot always be submitted to the economy of the primary and secondary processes.

Fink emphasizes that the nature of unconscious thought for Lacan is logico-mathematical and involves a certain amount of computation in order to be grasped at a conceptual level Fink, , The game that Lacan uses as a model for the autonomous combinatory of the symbol within the second seminar is the simple game of even and odd II , though here I find Fink's example of tossing a coin more suitable for a short discussion. This particular toss, which is totally random, can be re-organized in a varieties of ways, as Fink demonstrates.

In brief, the point is that however we choose to organize the combinations, certain results will become impossible. Moreover, a 2 can only follow a 1 and a 4 can only precede. As a result we see that there are definite rules in place, even though our initial grouping strategy was utterly arbitrary. Sequential happenings as 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 have disappeared entirely from the scene, and what remains is the four possible combinations according to our rule.

Even without going further in the possible complexity of these types of logico-mathematical games, we can see what is important about this demonstration. Any form of symbolic organization brings with it a constitution of reality that isolates certain elements of the unsymbolized Real. That is to say, the order of symbolization makes present certain aspects of the real, symbolizing both what is manifest in one way or another under various principles of organization, and what is absent under those same principles.

Thus Lacan says that in the symbolic order: What's at issue is a succession of absences and presences, or rather of presence on the background of absence, of absence constituted by the fact that a presence can exist. There is no absence in the real. The Insistence of the Unconscious It is this independent functioning of the symbol that gives rise to the unconscious determination of psychic reality for the subject, who may at times experience the results of unconscious thought as a dissonant aspect emerging from behind his or her back.

The independent proliferation of the symbolic organization gives rise to the repetition of certain experiences that, because they are excluded by symbolization cannot be submitted to the conceptualization of the reality principle. Yet they remain within the snares of the pleasure-seeking processes of the pleasure principle.

As an inanimate combinatorial function, the insistence of the unconscious that it be recognized with the full force of the primary process will manifest no concern for the well-being of the subject, and will continue to insist upon its realization ad infinitum nauseam. Thus even while the insistence of unconscious thought can manifest itself in a paradoxical or painful way for the subject, it will nonetheless proceed in its own inexorable order. This return of the same is something that cannot be regarded as a presencing of the symbol, insofar as what is repeated, as identical, cannot be produced in a network of signification that is characterized by difference, that is, the alternation of presence and absence.

Thus, what returns is in a sense a gap in the symbolic order, something which cannot be thought precisely because it cannot be symbolized. The real — which has no such rules — fails to meet with the symbolic chain in this instance and thus the chain of signifiers, trapped in the relentless expediency of the primary process, returns to the same place again and again. Every time, the real will be missed. Referring to Seminar XI, Fink illustrates an important topographical explanation that Lacan gives for why the real is necessarily structured for consciousness by the symbolic.

This topographical model puts perception at the level of the real, insofar as it is encountered. It is the non-representational nature of the real that brings on repetition, requiring the subject to return to that place of the lost object, the lost satisfaction. Every other satisfaction pales in comparison with the one that was lost, and the subject repetitively returns to the site of that absence in the hope of obtaining the real Thing, and yet forever missing it Fink, , So we see that in this topology human consciousness is necessarily structured by the symbolic order, and that this necessity involves the subject in an endless tension with the gap that the symbolic order necessarily produces.

If this gap happens to coincide with some excitation that has been fixed upon by the pleasure principle, what manifests is the compulsion to repeat.

Schematically, we can say that when something that is excluded from symbolization makes itself felt not only as a gap, but as a lack, then the primary process will be set in motion to try to resolve the tension produced by such a lack. Harmondsworth: Penguin, Google Scholar. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, Donne, John. Hugh Kenner. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, Garff, Joakim. Bruce H. Princeton: Princeton UP, Narrative Discourse.

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