You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis is often accused of being mere repetition of old jargon, Oedipal reductions, and the discursive rules of Freud and Lacan. The session becomes a repetition of theory, and theory a repetition of the session. In Stein's 1934 lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein remarks, “Is there repetition or is there insistence. I'm inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition” (p. 288). Something of this question (that characteristically lacks a question mark) resonates in the work of Lacan. Insistence is the point of entry for Lacan in his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter.”
Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism (Wiederholuangszwang) finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain. We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-sistence (or: eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery seriously.
Lacan reads Edgar Alan Poe's story as an illumination of Freud's repetition compulsion. The insistence here has to do with what is beyond the pleasure principle. If we return to Stein, that is to say, repetition must bring with it difference. Perhaps this is why we have the old Latin saying, “repetition is the mother of all learning” (and its less precise modern platitude, “practice makes perfect”). A psychoanalysis is contingent on this truth.
It is well known that repetition is not just the vehicle for analysis but also for comedy. The mechanisms of displacement and condensation detailed first in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams appear six years later in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. When we repeat we condense and displace; it is why we both laugh and dream. We all experience the play of suspense and release in the multiples of a joke (a priest, a rabbi, and a monk…). Repetitions in treatment can appear as tragic deadlocks or else farces met with resounding laughter. What makes some