Unhappy-Certainty *

Abstract

In 1914, Freud first proposed the concept of repetition compulsion, which received utmost importance in his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Thus, he drew our attention to the central role that this phenomenon plays in psychic life and to the anguish it imposes on the subject. Over the years, this concept has deviated from intrapsychic terminology and has also become understood as an occurrence that receives expression in interpersonal relationships. In contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, repetition compulsion is seen as involving the recurrence of painful relationship scripts that take on the character of a cruel fate. While a number of writers have discussed the hope that this phenomenon may be ingrained, a repetition compulsion is usually understood as an unadaptable pattern that limits the subject's possibilities of being. The various interpretations it has received speak of its various facets and of the need to investigate it further. This paper aims to enrich existing knowledge using an interdisciplinary approach that explores the way in which this phenomenon is manifested in our relationships and verbal communication with others. In this context, I propose to examine the continuous circular motion of repetition compulsion as part of a broader phenomenon of existential distress that I have called unhappy-certainty. This conceptualization constitutes a new connection between the Hegelian concept of unhappy consciousness and Wittgenstein's concept of certainty, which perceived the person's certainty as mythology based on common agreements in language, in the form of life. I propose that unhappy-certainty is a disease in which the subject is captured, as it were, in a given, rigid position that pervades their relationships, self-states, and language; a position from which they are unable to free themselves. In accordance with Hegelian dialectic, this conceptualization of repetition compulsion determines it to be a painful but necessary stage in the process of subject constitution. I will deal extensively with the aspects I sought to study, and discuss how psychoanalysis enables the subject to be extricated from misery.