Forms of repetition beyond the pleasure principle

Markus Zöchmeister

In the first chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud writes about different variations of the pleasure principle. He begins the following chapter with the question of repetition in traumatic neurosis and he brings as an example the recurring nightmares following an accident, which contradicts the wish-fulfilling tendency of the dream. Here Freud encounters an element that does not inscribe itself and causes the dreaming subject to awaken again and again with fright (Schreck). He wonders about this, leaves the question in abeyance, and comes to talk about repetition in children's play. Here, different forms of repetition are revealed, which are within and beyond the pleasure principle, in which the play repeats something and at the same time there seems to be an element that always eludes inscription, which seems to be missed again with each new repetition.

Disappearance

“One day the child’s mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words “Baby o-o-o-o” which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror image ‘gone’.”1

This discovery of the child, which is articulated via the first signifiers "baby o-o-o-o!“, which Freud transcribes as "fort", behaves like a reversed mirror stage. It is not that the child discovers its image, but that it discovers that through its actions it can take this very image out of the mirror again. It repeats this discovery around the fixation of its disappearance. And by taking itself out of the picture, it brings the signifiers to light "baby o-o-o-o!“. These signifiers seem as libidinous as the discovery of the image itself. Is it not Freud's answer to Lacan's mirror stage, for this must certainly have preceded the discovery of the child?

In his action before the mirror, Freud's grandson finds his disappearance. In other words, the child discovers that there is nothing behind the mirror. And to the extent that the child brushes his image out of the mirror, the signifiers “baby o-o-o!” come to light. Perhaps we can say that in this articulation, it identifies with its own disappearance in the imaginary as a finding again in the symbolic. What the child repeats when the mother comes back, is the discovery of its disappearance in the mirror as a significant articulation. It disappears on the imaginary stage (Schauplatz), the scene for the little other who has just jubilantly entered life, to find itself again in the symbolic, where it is the object for the Other. It now has an image, which means that it can also erase it. Thus, in the reappearance of the mother, it introduces its little object a, which, in addition to the note of its image, also carries the note of the cause that appears in the disappearance of its image.

Two kinds of repetition and two kinds of satisfaction

“We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure event. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.” 2

The case discussed here by Sigmund Freud is that of the little child's game of Fort-Da, which Freud came to know when his grandson was present in his living quarters for some time. Freud is astonished by this game. His astonishment lies in the moment when the child repeats that sequence of play alone, which is not connected with an assumed pleasure gain that lies in the reappearance of the object. Freud asks why the child repeats the first act, the departure of the object disproportionately more often than the entire game with the second part, which involves the reappearance of the object and its pleasurable ending. His question is a question about the object. An entire tradition of object relations theory - from John Bowlby to Otto Kernberg - misses this astonishment of Freud. why this insistence of the first part, Freud asks. We find the first answer in Jacques Lacan in Seminar Book VII. There Lacan distinguishes the need-for-repetition from the repetition-of-need. In his XVI lecture he points out that the need-for-repetition only serves as an opportunity to satisfy the repetition-of-need3. So, there are two kinds of repetition and two kinds of satisfaction in play. In the child's Fort-Da game, we see both types of repetition broken down into the two parts. While the need-for-repetition takes the Da of the object as its goal, this Da is missed and becomes in the first part an ever repeating Fort, on which the child's repetition of need, or compulsive repetition (Wiederholungszwang) insists.

References

1 Freud S. (1920), Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, Vol 18, p. 15

2 Freud S. (1920), Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, Vol 18, p. 16

3 Lacan J., The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Chapter XVI.