Preface

What I have learned from de Clérambault, says Lacan, is one thing above all else: l'automatisme mental.Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, whom Lacan credits as his "only master in psychiatry," developed the notion of mental automatism as the basic explicative principle of the human psyche.As Lacan himself indicates when writing about his antecedents (De nos antécédents, first published in 1966), 1 his entry into psychoanalysis was profoundly determined by connecting the principle of mental automatism with Freud's discovery of repetition compulsion as the elementary force of the psychic apparatus.From this perspective, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis later developed by Lacan can be seen as derivations of this single fundamental insight.The unconscious, transference, and drive are but variations on one principle -the principle of repetition.In his notorious book on repetition published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantinus, Kierkegaard, whom Lacan calls "the greatest examiner of the soul before Freud," discovered the paradox of repetition."The only thing repeated was the impossibility of repetition," 2 writes Constantin Constantinus after his return to Copenhagen, disillusioned with his experimental journey to Berlin, where he wanted to practically examine the possibility of repetition.The paradox is, therefore, the following: An exact repetition of the same is not possible -but it is precisely this impossibility that keeps repeating.The fact that it is merely the impossibility of repetition that keeps repeating is what first even establishes the actual terrain of repetition: This stubborn return of the failure of repetition is already repetition itself.Kierkegaard thereby traces a new, modern logic of failure, which does not bring resignation and destruction but is rather constitutive insofar as it operates as the condition of possibility of every kind of motion or change.xi