On Repetition, On Novelty
Novelty - repetition’s negative, is always the condition of enjoyment. Without novelty it’s impossible to enjoy and novelty is the experience repetition sets out to manage.
“Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment.”-S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud’s writing repeatedly returns to the repetitious nature of our lives. Not only did Freud find repetition in what came to be called transference, neurotic symptoms, and eventually the notorious death instinct, but also in pleasure and relationships. For Freud, it’s as though there are original experiences that we then go on repeating endlessly like a wind-up toy that will waddle on as long as its gears keep churning. In casting humans as repetitious creatures, it can seem difficult to imagine potential for novelty in Freud. The epigraph for this essay is taken from Freud’s 1920 paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle — a work that moves his anthropology toward repetition being fundamental.
In his paper, Freud makes a remarkable and puzzling statement: “Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment.” Just as he’s making the case that we’re pulled by the power of an instinct to repeat that precedes the pleasure principle, he says that novelty, repetition’s negative, is always the condition of enjoyment. Without novelty it’s impossible to enjoy and novelty is the experience repetition sets out to manage. Freud’s sentence calls attention to just how constitutionally ambivalent we are about both novelty and enjoyment if we really are the animals who are compelled to repeat ourselves. It is worth wondering what the conditions for novelty are in his writing on repetition and imagine what it may take to get there given how repetitious he finds us, as novelty is not only “the condition of enjoyment” but also, in part, of therapeutic change. Before exploring novel potentials, however, it’s important to grasp just how repetitious Freud understands us to be and why.
The questions and frustrations posed by the reality of repetition drove Freud to posit a repetition compulsion and, ultimately, a death instinct. So powerful and confusing was the draw to repeat pain to Freud that he began to think it was, so to speak, natural; the fact that we’re equally liable to repeat pain as we are pleasure led to a new take on Freud’s theory regarding the pleasure principle. (A confrontation with repetition paradoxically led to a change in theory, which is much like the logic of psychoanalytic treatment.) He asserts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that our instinct to repeat precedes the pleasure principle all together — that we’re repetitious animals before we become pleasure seeking animals, reversing his assumption that we’re pleasure seeking creatures at base.
Despite Freud rendering repetition to be partially instinctually based, the topic of repetition continuously begs the question of why it’s so difficult to experience novelty. And one of the myriad answers to this question is related to what Freud calls “fright” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. If novelty is the condition of enjoyment, then fright is the condition of trauma. “Fright,” Freud writes, “…is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasises the factor of surprise.” A main factor in “fright,” which is a major part of what leads to repetition born of trauma, is surprise. It is the lack of preparedness, in this trauma story, for the stimuli brought down on the human animal that produces traumatic fright, not necessarily the blunt force of the stimuli itself. In other words, if we’d been prepared the fright wouldn’t have occurred, so we remain repetitious so as not to repeat the overwhelming surprise.
By introducing the element of surprise as a conditioning factor for traumatic repetition, we begin to see how closely traumatic fright, novelty, and enjoyment are linked for Freud. We’re literally frightened out of novelty and begin to live in a way to ward of the possibility of surprise. (This, too, can be said of the repetitions produced by the “no” of repression — the repressed mustn’t be (re)experienced.) Trauma and repression, and the ensuing repetitive symptoms and behaviours, bring forth doubts about the desirability of novelty, casting the new, the potentially thrilling and enjoyable, in a strongly ambivalent light. And if novelty really is always the condition of enjoyment, to put it as strongly as Freud does, we’re really in a bind.
Having grasped, in part, Freud’s understanding of repetition’s function and power, the task of exploring the conditions for novelty, and therefore enjoyment, remains. In 1914, six years before Beyond the Pleasure Principle was published, Freud officially made repetition one of the cornerstones of the psychoanalytic treatment he invented. (He had certainly discussed repetition prior to this paper, but 1914 is his first sustained treatment of the topic by this name.) And in making repetition a pathogenic element of therapy, Freud implicitly includes a capacity for novelty as a therapeutic goal. Experiencing the person of the analyst as a new person, rather than unconsciously making her an old one, is part of a therapeutic course of action, as is growing to the point that the repetitions of symptoms abate. The work of psychoanalysis, according to Freud’s remarkable paper Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, is to convert symptomatic repetition into conscious memory, thereby creating the possibility of having a new experience by working through the resistances we have to memory and, paradoxically, novelty. We repeat what we’ve repressed so as not to remember the unbearable, go on repeating until we remember, and a part of us is hell bent on never remembering.
It’s as though Freud, in 1914 (before he wrestled with the problem posed by trauma in 1920), is saying if the patient can remember, can retrieve the past (mnemonically, affectively, etc.) in a good enough way, their future may open up. As we create history through the labour of remembering and working through, versions of the future proliferate. Instead of compulsively making things old, we can tolerate the ambivalence of the novel. Though different, applying the same treatment logic to repetitions born of trauma may be possible. There is room in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to imagine a psychoanalytic treatment of trauma dealing in mastering old excesses of feeling in order to return them to history, as opposed to living an un-history daily. If the analyst and analysand can transform the felt to be untransformable experience of trauma, then the future may reopen. This treatment would be about gaining a good enough mastery of the affects produced by the fright of the trauma and that accompany the aftermath of trauma, so that the traumatic experience may not need to be repeated continuously.
In many ways, it is growth in tolerance for the unknown future that may be the condition for novelty and therefore enjoyment to be experienced from a Freudian perspective. Where once foreclosure of novelty through repetition was, there a capacity for openness to the possibility of a non-traumatic experience may grow toward ambivalence. Perhaps this growth is possible through the long, difficult road of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis via the slow working through of the transference and symptoms, affects and pathogenic beliefs. Perhaps the conditions for the art of novelty and enjoyment in Freud involves, to quote the famously unoptimistic writer Samuel Becket, “doing a little better the same old thing.” (Beckett famously said of himself that he had “little talent for happiness.”) Though it is impossible in the Freudian life story to be unrepetitious, working to compromise for a life of being ambivalent about novelty seems to be the best thing going and, to Freud, simply the best we can do.
Tennyson is a psychotherapist working at a counseling center in Nashville, TN. He works with children, adolescents, adults, and families. He earned his MSW at The University of Tennessee. Currently, he is a candidate at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute.
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