{"id":2931,"date":"2023-12-12T08:08:11","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T08:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2023-12-12T08:12:50","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T08:12:50","slug":"%d1%84%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%b3%d0%bc%d0%b5%d0%bd%d1%82-%d1%84%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%81%d0%b0%d1%86%d0%b8%d1%8f-%d0%b8-%d0%bf%d0%be%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d0%b5%d0%bd%d0%b8%d0%b5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/?p=2931&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Fragment Fixation and Repetition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My comment is on a fragment from Lacan\u2019s seminar XI \u2013 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis<\/em>. The fragment is from Tuch\u00e9 and Automaton<\/em> chapter, the section is The Unconscious and Repetition. <\/em>The text that I will comment consists of four paragraphs, from page 62 to page 63 of the English edition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main focus of the text, commented by Lacan, refers to the fort \u2013 da<\/em> game. Freud describes and comments it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. <\/em>His observations are upon \u201cthe first independently created game\u201d of his grandson, a boy of a year and a half.  <\/em>Freudnotices that he has \u201cthe irritating habit\u201d to throw his toys at the corners and to play with them on hiding.<\/em>  The child has a wooden reel on which a thread is coiled. He throws it through the tray of his bed so that it disappears from his sight and while doing this, he articulates ambiguously o-o-o-o, which according to his mother and the observers, says Freud, means fort (it is not there)<\/em>. Then he draws back the reel with the thread, and \u201ccheers its appearance with a joyful da<\/em> (here it is<\/em>)\u201d (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 75 from The Ego and the Id, Bulgarian edition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What attracts the attention of Freud is the repetition in this game. A tireless repetition of this disappearance and appearance. And he says that \u201ca lot of time had to pass before the enigmatic and constantly repeated action obtain its meaning\u201d (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 74 from The Ego and the Id, Bulgarian edition). Freud is asking himself the question how the pleasure principle is coherent with the fact that this painful experience for the child, the disappearance of the mother, repeats as a game.  And while Freud stresses on the active role the child is occupying while playing, Lacan will say that this is of secondary importance. Lacan refers to Wallon who stresses that the child does not immediately watch the door through which his mother has disappeared, but that his vigilance was aroused earlier, at the very point she left him, at the point she moved away from him.  The game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the mother’s absence has created for the child \u2013 a gap, a ditch<\/em>, around which one can only play at jumping. (Lacan, Seminar XI, Tuch\u00e9 and Automaton<\/em>, p. 62).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacan says that the reel is not the mother, reduced to a small ball by some magical game, but a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We could refer here to the consent we give to enter language, symbolic, to agree with being split by signifiers, which at the same time will never be able to completely cover, fill this \u201cever-open gap\u201d (Lacan, p. 62).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have here in this game the birth of the signifier (in the form of an opposition between two signifiers, S1 and S2), the barred subject, object a\u201d, <\/em>says Bruce Fink in The real Cause of Repetition.<\/em> <\/em>The signifier comes to signify something that is not there; it marks, and makes the appearance of the subject of the unconscious possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This game symbolizes the repetition, Lacan says, but not at all that of some need that might demand the return of the mother, and which would be expressed quite simply in a cry. It is the repetition of the mother’s departure as a cause of a Spaltung<\/em> in the subject and overcome by the alternating game of fort-da<\/em>. Its aim is to be the fort <\/em>of a d<\/em>a, and the da<\/em> of a fort<\/em>.(Lacan, p.62-63)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Repetition aims at what is not there (in the symbolic order), at the lost object. Lacan says in the text: \u201cIt is aimed at what, essentially, is not there, qua represented\u2014for it is the game itself that is the Repr\u00e4sentanz of the Vorstellung.\u201c (Lacan, p.63). It is translated in English – the<\/em> representative of the representation<\/em>.  Repr\u00e4sentanz refers to the symbolic, to the place in the unconscious, which holds the Vorstellung – may we say so?  Vorstellungsrepr\u00e4sentanz is a placeholder for the representation. Vorstellung refers to the real, it is something that is missing, missing in the symbolic chain and thus it is on the level of the lost object. The signifier represents something, which cannot be presented, which cannot speak for itself. \u201cThe signifier creates, thereby killing what it purportedly \u201crepresents\u201d\u201d (Bruce Fink, The Real Cause of Repetition, p.228). \u201eIt is the non-representational nature of the real that brings on repetition, requiring the subject to return to that place of the lost object, the lost satisfaction. Every other satisfaction pales in comparison with the one that was lost, and the subject repetitively returns to the site of that absence in the hope of obtaining the real Thing<\/em>, and yet forever missing it\u201d  (Bruce Fink, The Real Cause of Repetition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this seminar \u201cLacan shows that there is a repetition and there is a repetition\u201d (Miler, Transference, Repetition, and Sexual Real, p.7). Repetition here is presented, on one hand, as having a symbolic character, and on the other \u2013 as directed towards the real, \u201cthat which always comes back to the same place for the subject, but which the subject does not encounter\u201d(Miler, Reading Seminar XI). \u201cRepetition is above all introduced as a split between automaton and tuch\u00e9<\/em>, that is, as a split between signifier and real\u201d (Miler, Transference, Repetition, and Sexual Real, p.7). While automaton is connected with \u201cthe automatic unfolding in the unconscious of the signifying chain\u201d, the return, the insistence of signs, tuch\u00e9<\/em> involves the encounter with the real, which is beyond automaton<\/em>\u201d (Bruce Fink, The Real Cause of Repetition, p.225). Tuch\u00e9<\/em> interrupts something in the signifying chain, in the smooth functioning of automaton<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacan speaks of the real as always connected with a mistake and an impossible encounter. \u201cIt is an appointment with some thing that is never there at the meeting place\u201d (Miler, p.14). The symbolic, the signifiers fail in encompassing, meeting the real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat Lacan makes apparent in the section on „The Unconscious and Repetition“ in Seminar XI is that you repeat because you have not fulfilled your aim. You have fulfilled something, but it is not what it ought to be\u201d. (Miler, Reading Seminar XI). Miler also points out that Freud talks about repetition in reference to something that is always missed, and that is lacking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRepetition is always connected to a lost object, it is an attempt to refind the lost object yet, in so doing, to miss it.\u201d (Miler, p.14). Repetition here is presented as \u201cthe signifying chain that always misses the real\u201d (Miler,Transference, Repetition, and Sexual Real, p.7).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miler stresses that not the repetition is important, but what is missed. Repetition is always connected with the return of something else, it is never the same.  The very object a, <\/em>the real is excluded from the signifying chain. Thought is unable to encounter it but the chain revolves around it. (Bruce Fink, The Real Cause of Repetition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn seminar XI repetition as automatism is restored as the avoidance of, and, at the same time, appeal to an encounter with an initial real, which is the real of traumatism. Lacan refers to the concept of traumatism in Freud by making it into the Freudian concept of the inassimilable to the signifier.\u201d (Miler, Transference, Repetition, and the Sexual Real).  As Miler says, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it\u2014in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin. What is repeated is always something that occurs, as if by chance, referring thus to tuch\u00e9<\/em>. \u201cThe motor of repetition here is: repetition, as symbolic as it is, appears to be determined by traumatism as real\u201d. (Miler, Transference, Repetition, and the Sexual Real). This is one of the big changes in the concept of repetition that Lacan makes in this seminar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Valentina Milcheva<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My comment is on a fragment from Lacan\u2019s seminar XI \u2013 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The fragment is from Tuch\u00e9 and Automaton chapter, the section is The Unconscious and Repetition. The text that I will comment consists of four paragraphs, from page 62 to page 63 of the English edition. The main focus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category--en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2932,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions\/2932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/valentinamilcheva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}