The accidental in Freud‘s repetition

Sarah Birgani

“[…] we may make use of a rule, discovered empirically, which recommends us to get the dreamer to tell us his dream once more. In doing so, he usually alters his modes of expression in some parts of it while repeating the rest accurately. The points at which his reproduction is defective owing to changes, and often owing to omissions as well, are the points which we fasten upon, because the inaccuracy guarantees a connection with the complex and promises the best approach to the secret meaning of the dream.“1

In German Wiederholung literally means to fetch (holen) something again (wieder). What shimmers through in this formulation is the idea, that there is something there to reach again – again in the same way. Thus, the new, the accidental, that part of repetition, which Lacan calls in Seminar XI 2 Tuché, the encounter with the real, is not inscribed in the German word Wiederholung.

And yet, already in Freud there are traces, where he connects the repetition to something accidental.

One trace concerns the technique of dream interpretation. Freud sometimes urged his patients to repeat the dream narrative. And lo and behold, what does Freud tell us at this point? He says that it is precisely those elements which are newly added, which are omitted – in short, that which eludes the ever-same repetition in the sense of faithful reproduction, which the analyst should be interested in. Repetition is not reproduction, Freud's choice of words in relation to repetition marks this: he writes ‘similar,’ ‘repetition and remaking,’ ‘not simply repeating but continuing,’ ‘repeating in part,’ ‘repeating in a kind of revitalization.’

The repeating of an accidental.

The accidental in repeating.

So, from the beginning, Freud shows us, and with Lacan we can further elaborate this thread, that what is at stake in Wiederholung is exactly that which is not wieder-geholt (re-fetched).

References

1 Freud, S. (1906). Psychoanalysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London, Hogarth Press, pp. 109–110.

2 Lacan, J. (1964). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. (Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan), London/New York, Norton & Co., 1998.