Table of Contents

Translator’s Acknowledgments

Preface to the English Language Edition: A Conversation with Dr. Nasio

Part I.

A Clinical Experience in which the Psychoanalyst Listens to His or Her Patient While Being Mindful of the Concept of Repetition

Twofold Empathy: The Exclusive Skill of the Psychoanalyst

A General Definition of Repetition

The Beneficial Effects of Healthy Repetition: Self-Preservation, Self-Fulfillment, and Identity Formation

Three Modes of the Return of Our Past: In Our Consciousness, in Our Healthy Acts, and in Our Pathological Actions

Pathological Repetition is the Compulsive Return of a Traumatic Past that Erupts in the Present as a Symptom or as an Impulsive Action

Two Modalities of Pathological Repetition: Temporal Repetition and Topological Repetition

Figures 1 and 2: Two Categories of Pathological Repetition: Temporal and Topological

The Drive is the Compulsive Force of Jouissance

The Lacanian Theory of Repetition: The Unconscious is Structured as a Repetition Automatism

Diagram 1: Repetition According to Lacan

An Example of Pathological Repetition: Bernard, or the Uncontrollable and Repetitive Need to be Humiliated

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Pathological Repetition through its Revivification

Diagram 2: A Concluding Diagram
Healthy Repetition
Pathological Repetition
Therapeutic Revivification

Part II.

Excerpts from Freud and Lacan on Repetition, Preceded by our Commentaries

Figure 1: Schema of Deferred Action

Figure 2: Engendering the Subject of the Unconscious at the Point of Closure, C, of the Repetitive Loop

Index

About the Author

Juan-David Nasio is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in Paris. He was the first psychoanalyst to be inducted into the prestigious French Legion of Honor. David Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. He is the coeditor and cotranslator of many books, including Nasio's Oedipus: The Most Crucial Concept in Psychoanalysis (cotranslated with François Raffoul), also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"A clear, accessible, and highly readable contribution to psychoanalytic literature in the Freudian and Lacanian traditions. Nasio's writing, and its translation by Pettigrew, is extremely lucid, especially by the standards of much Lacanian literature. This is a very worthwhile book in its own right." — Adrian Johnston, author of Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing'