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Volume 11, Number 2
July-December 2007

Tra ricordo e destino: la ripetizione
(Between memory and destiny: Repetition)
Norberto Carlos Marucco


SUMMARY

This essay focuses mainly on the topic of repetition (agieren) on its metapsychological, clinical and technical conceptions. It contains a core problem, that is the question of the represented, the nonrepresented and the unrepresentable in the psyche. This problem, in turn, brings to light the dialectical relation between drive and object and its specific articulation with the traumatic. The author attributes special significance to its clinical expression as "destiny". He points out a shift in the theory of the cure from recollection and the unveiling of unconscious desires, to the possibility of understanding "pure" repetition, which would constitute the very essence of the drive. The author highlights three types of repetition, namely: "representative" (oedipal) repetition, the repetition of the "nonrepresented" (narcissistic), which may gain representation, and that of the "unrepresentable" (sensory impressions, lived experiences from primal times, prelinguistic signifiers, ungovernable mnemic traces). The concept-metaphor drive embryo brings the author close to the question of the archaic in psychoanalysis, where the repetition in the act would express itself. "Another unconscious" would "zealously" conceal the entombed (verschüttet) that we are not yet able to describe - the "innermost" rather than the "buried" (untergegangen) or the "annihilated" (zugrunde gegangen) - through a mechanism whose way of expression is repetition in the act. With Constructions in analysis as its starting point, this pare suggests a different technical implementation from that of the Freudian construction: its main material is what emerges in the present of the transference as the repetition of "something" lacking as history. The memory of the analytic process offers a historical diachrony whereby a temporality freed from repetition and utterly unique might unfold in the analysis. This diachrony would no longer be the historical reconstruction of the material truth, but the construction of something new. The author briefly introduces some aspects of his conception of the psyche and of therapeutic work in terms of what he has designated as psychic zones. These zones are associated with various modes of becoming unconscious and coexist with different degrees of prevalence according to the psychopathology. Yet each of them will emerge with unique features in different moments of every analysis, determining both the analyst's position and the very conditions of the analytic field. The zone of the death drive and of repetition is at the centre of this essay. "Pure" repetition expresses a time halted by the constant reiteration of an atemporal present. In this case, the "royal road" for the expression of "that" unconscious will be the act. The analyst's presence and his own drive wager will be pivotal to provide a last attempt at binding that will allow the creation of the lost "psychic fabric" and the construction, in a conjectural way, of some sort of "history" that may unravel the entombed (verschüttet) elements that, in these patients' case come to the surface in the act. The analysand's "pure" repetition touches, resonates with something of the new unconscious of the analyst. All of this leads the author to underline once again the value of the analyst's self-analysis and reanalysis in search of connections and especially in differentiating between what belongs to the analyst and what belongs to the analysand. A certain degree of unbinding ensures the preservation of something ungraspable that protects one from the other's appropriation.