Along the paths of repetition

Repetition is found in the foundations of psychoanalytic knowledge, as well as being very present in clinical practice. In this paper, we present an analysis of the incidence of repetition in the work of Sigmund Freud, pointing to its profound relationship with other key notions of psychoanalysis, such as the unconscious, repression, transference, and instinct. We highlight the emergence of the phenomenon of repetition compulsion and the turn of the 1920s, emphasizing the clash between repetition and meaning, the conceptualization of the death drive, and the new drive dualism. In this journey, we demonstrate how psychoanalysis has shifted from its status as an art of interpretation to working with the excess of drive that cannot be represented. It is in the face of this challenge of dealing with the traumatic and the non-meaning that psychoanalysis has been reinventing itself since its inception and that it can, in our day, serve as a powerful resource for reading and intervening in contemporary phenomena and modes of suffering.