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`In the Beginning was Repetition'

On Inversions and Reversals in Psychoanalytic Time

In psychoanalysis, every beginning is a repetition. While such a seeming paradox is not at odds with speculations in cosmology and thermodynamics, it is central to the conception of retroactive causality distinctive to psychoanalysis. Through a series of autobiographical and clinical examples taken from Freud, it is argued that the symptom, transference and memory all depend on a return, a repetition, of a past scene which acquires its causal power in the act of interpretation. Such a practice has much in common with the temporality found in fictions of causal loops connecting the present and the future.

Key Words: Freud • memory • repetition • time • transference

Time & Society, Vol. 1, No. 2, 287-300 (1992)
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X92001002010


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