Warning: "continue" targeting switch is equivalent to "break". Did you mean to use "continue 2"? in /data/sites/web/psychoanalytischeperspectievenbe/www/wp-content/themes/pp/includes/builder/functions.php on line 5704
In The Course Of Events Everything Will Become Clear: Repetition and Temporality in Lacan’s early Seminars | Psychoanalytische Perspectieven

In The Course Of Events Everything Will Become Clear: Repetition and Temporality in Lacan’s early Seminars

by | Vol 35 (3) 2017

This paper looks at how the concepts of repetition and temporality were being conceptualised at the early stage of Lacan’s work in terms of his interest in cybernetics, and explores how repetition and temporality were being brought together within the overarching framework presented in the postface to the seminar on The Purloined Letter. Consideration is given to how Lacan theorises the automatic, autonomous nature of unconscious contents, their timeless indestructible character, and the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory. Adding to this Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, the author looks at the difficulties in conceptualising a psychoanalytic notion of time within the context of repetition compulsion.

Related articles

  • The Laws of Repetition, A Meditation

    In this meditation, the author enumerates, in reference to his clinical practise as well as to his reading of Freud and Lacan, six laws of repetition: 1. repetition is continuous; 2. repetition operates in function of life; 3. repetition does not come down to mere reproduction but exists only through variation; 4. in repetition, smaller and bigger "rounds" are to be differentiated; 5. repetition operates in function of the cruelty of jouissance; 6. when one realizes that, beyond any mastering…

  • You cannot become One

    The evolution of Lacan's theory of the body in psychosis is presented, starting from his seminar on the sinthome. Some points of rupture can be found retrospectively in Lacan's theory. From his first conceptualization of the imaginary body, then of the symbolic body and finally of the real body, Lacan comes to the conclusion that the imaginary, the symbolic and the real must be knotted. Lacan's latest teaching offers novel perspectives on the difficult relation between body, language and jouissance…

  • Repetition in Psychosis: A Theoretical Question

    This article investigates the theoretical issue of whether the concept of repetition is applicable to psychosis. In the neurotic subject, repetition is a reaction to the lack in the Other. The subject is confronted with a lack, a chance event, a question to which he has no answer. As a consequence, the neurotic is passively subjected to the Other. A case study makes it clear that the psychotic reacts differently to the lack in the Other. On the one hand,…