domi

From Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926):

• “The child repeats these experiences not because they were pleasurable in the ordinary sense, but because the repetition enables him to deal with the anxiety they originally caused.”

Freud’s revelation casts repetition as a shadowed dance with anxiety, a child’s unconscious rite to tame the wild echoes of experience. Jean Piaget recasts this as a luminous forging of mind, where infants, through sensorimotor loops—dropping, grasping, banging—wrest order from chaos, not to soothe a trembling heart but to scaffold a world of cause and effect. Melanie Klein, threading psychoanalytic threads, sees a darker tapestry: children replaying tales of love and dread, splitting the mother into saint and specter, their verbal and playful chants a fragile bridge over the abyss of relational fears. Each repetition, in these visions, is a prism—Freud’s to quell, Piaget’s to know, Klein’s to mend—refracting the restless pulse of growth through distinct hues of purpose. Jacques Lacan drapes this in linguistic veils, where repetition is no mere balm but a haunting refrain, the child’s voice or gesture looping through the “Symbolic” to skirt the “Real”—that jagged void of unnamable want. It’s a siren’s call of desire, forever circling an absent core, less resolution than eternal return. Fritz Perls, with Gestalt’s fierce clarity, rends the past’s shroud, insisting repetition is the soul’s unfinished song, sung anew in the blazing now. Here, the child’s echoed acts—words, motions—become a crucible, not for Freud’s buried ghosts, but for forging wholeness from fracture. From Freud’s shadowed compulsion to Piaget’s bright discovery, Klein’s tender repair, Lacan’s elusive echo, and Perls’ vivid presence, repetition emerges as a multifaceted hymn, each note a child’s bold grasp at mastering the unmasterable. Jacques Derrida steps into this chorus with a subversive whisper, unraveling repetition’s very thread. For him, each echo—be it Freud’s compulsion or Piaget’s play—is never a pure return but a “différance,” a deferral and difference woven into the act itself. The child’s repeated words or gestures, in Derrida’s gaze, are not anchors to meaning but spectral traces, haunted by what they cannot fully grasp or repeat. Where Freud seeks mastery and Perls completion, Derrida sees an endless play of absence—repetition not as closure but as an open wound, a ceaseless inscription of anxiety’s trace across time. In his lens, the child’s refrain becomes a poignant paradox: a quest for presence that forever slips, leaving only the shimmer of what might have been.

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Emmanuel Levinas would approach Freud’s notion of repetition—“The child repeats these experiences not because they were pleasurable in the ordinary sense, but because the repetition enables him to deal with the anxiety they originally caused”—from a radically different angle. While Freud frames repetition as an inward, self-directed mechanism to manage anxiety, Levinas would likely reinterpret it as an ethical encounter, a response to the inescapable call of the Other. For Levinas, the child’s repetition isn’t merely a psychological tool for mastery or coping; it’s a primordial gesture toward the face of the Other—be it the mother, caregiver, or world—that summons the child into responsibility before selfhood fully forms. In Levinas’s view, anxiety doesn’t originate solely from internal conflict or past trauma, as Freud suggests, but from the overwhelming proximity of the Other, whose infinite demand ruptures the child’s nascent ego. Repetition—verbal chants, habitual acts—becomes a way to bear this ethical weight, not to resolve it. The child’s “fort-da” game, for instance, might not just master the mother’s absence but enact a dialogue with her irreducible alterity, a stuttering attempt to respond to her departure and return. Where Freud sees a drive to control, Levinas might discern a preconscious obligation: the child repeats because the Other’s presence (and absence) commands it, pulling them into relation before they can retreat into solitude. This shifts repetition from a solipsistic loop to an ethical opening. Unlike Lacan’s endless deferral or Perls’s present wholeness, Levinas would argue that the child’s actions are less about self-completion and more about facing the infinite. The anxiety Freud identifies isn’t something to overcome but a trace of the Other’s transcendence, a summons that repetition both honors and struggles to articulate. For Levinas, the child’s refrain—be it word or gesture—isn’t a fortress against dread but a fragile offering, a way of saying “here I am” to a world that always precedes and exceeds them. In this light, repetition is less mastery than a perpetual, ethical awakening.