‘an unconscious plot’
Is it possible to feel differently about repetition?
Can it be imagined as a force for good?
Sometimes it’s not so hard. The New Year’s resolution that we manage to keep. The return of an anniversary that we celebrate. The favourite thing. The great song—music’s wondrous iterations, calls and responses … Dancing …
But what about the return of something painful that I didn’t wish for, or the feeling of being caught out, or caught full stop. It happened again! I did it again, how could I not see? Time after time. There’s no escape … The story seems to play out again and again, as if it were fated to do so, on nerves prepared (but somehow never enough) for suffering.
The experience is both confused and all too clear. It dictates. It includes the blow to self-esteem that can be dealt by the unexpected.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy offers an engagement or re-engagement with an inner multiplicity of levels and tones of experience, instead of the authoritarian messages that Jacques Derrida, in a different but entirely relevant conversation, identifies with the dominance of “a single voice on the line, a continuous speech.” Part of what he’s encouraging is an enthusiasm for repetition, rereading the tradition, including our inner traditions; finding “still other forms, other kinds of music” by returning to what’s already here: ‘I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech—one which has not yet been allowed to speak.”
Therapy begins with repetition.
References
CD III, Get Tough [1983] on Rare Preludes Volume IV, 1993.
Jacques Derrida, Interview with Catherine David in Le Nouvel Observateur, September 1983, translated by Peggy Kamuf in Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews 1974-1994, 130.