REPETITION AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

The Letter, Issue 70, pages 39-70

REPETITION AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

Daragh Howard

Lacan confronts the problem of reality as he is reformulating his metapsychology of repetition in the first half of the 1960s. Even in its basic manifestations, repetition requires an act in relation to the domain of objects, and an act in turn relies on a principle of psychical life that won’t settle for an hallucination at the level of the pleasure principle. However, according to Lacan, the relationship of the pleasure principle and the reality principle is characterised by disequilibrium and inadequation. This inadequation is underwritten by the fault in psychical reality which lies between perception and thought as acknowledged by Freud from his early work onwards, and later developed by Lacan in his conceptualization of the real during the 1960s. Lacan is particularly attentive to the problem of repetition and reality in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60) and the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964).

Keywords: Repetition; Reality; Real; Reality Principle; Trauma; Resistance; Acting Out; o-object; Death Drive; Representation; Perception; Pleasure Principle; Dreaming and Awakening

Part I. The Metapsychology of Reality

Even if it is Disagreeable 

     Lacan:  Wiederholen. Nothing has been more enigmatic – especially on the subject of that bipartition, of such structural importance to the whole of Freudian psychology, of the pleasure principle and the reality principle – nothing has been more enigmatic than this Wiederholen, which is very close, so the most prudent etymologists tell us, to the verb to ‘haul’…very close to a hauling of the subject, who always drags his thing into a certain path that he cannot get out of. [1]

In Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning from 1911, Freud states that the introduction of the reality principle, founded upon his theory of the secondary process, is a conceptual necessity in the psychoanalytic account of mental life: [2] 

I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere when I suggest that the state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs.[3] When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination.[4]

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