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.
On the basis of the negative therapeutic reaction, Freud conceived of repetition as beyond the pleasure principle. From that concept he hypothesized the death instinct: its aim is a reduction from the complex to the simple. In contrast, in the process of healing and cure, what is achieved is a greater complexity. Following Klein, Bion, Meltzer, Winnicott, Searles, and Green, the author emphasizes that there are two different processes connected with repetition: those that result in re-editions and those that make new editions. The first demand an instinctive discharge, the latter a process of charge: a semantic charge, a mnemic charge. Traumatic experience demands a psychic registration because of the original semantic emptiness connected with the trauma.
Repetition was an inspirational concept for Freud. For the first time in science, through the concepts of trauma and repetition, the neuroses were placed in the field of reversible phenomena. From trauma, repetition, discharge theory, through libido theory and complementary series theory, it is the ego that reconciles pleasure and reality. Repetition follows the pleasure principle; the symptom reflects the peremptoriness of discharge. The preconscious transforms the unconscious wish from its representational labyrinth: in the preconscious the repetition acquires originality. The preconscious transforms the drives.
Already in “The ‘Uncanny’” and more clearly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud found repetition that does not follow the pleasure principle. This repetition tends to a charge, not discharge. The final aim of this kind of repetition is a process of psychic charge that makes possible the unconscious representation. If in the trauma quantitative vicissistudes are such that the ego is overwhelmed, a portion of the ego will be alien to the traumatic experience, which is thus not registered. What can be represented is interrupted at the point where the ego was overwhelmed. Later, libidinization guides repetit