The echoes of repetition

a dialogue between Kierkegaard and Freud

Abstract

Considering the still little known relationship between Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1859), the aim of this article is to think about the horizon of the concept of repetition as a philosophical and psychoanalytic problem. The hypothesis to be argued here is that the Danish thinker and the father of psychoanalysis, while not actually having any interaction, made use of important conceptual tools for psychoanalysis. We will show how the reflections of Kierkegaard and Freud sometimes approach and sometimes they distance themselves. In this regard, the article contributes both to thinking about a possible conceptual approximation between Kierkegaard and Freud, and to approaching a background that deals with the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, as it permeates the discussions of both about the place of repetition. The presupposition of this approximation is the conjecture sustained here that Kierkegaard anticipates in the 19th century a theme that would be taken up by psychoanalytic theory in the following century. We will think of the Kierkegaardian perspective with his work: Repetition, while in Freud we will frequent the works: Repeating, remembering and Working-Through (1914) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).