Repetition as an Existential Experience (Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard)

The leading question of the article is whether repetition can safeguard what is particular from being subsumed under the universal. To this query, a related problem is appended, of whether an individual can be freed from the strictures of history, and whether history allows repetition occasionally failing to obliterate all that has already occurred. In other words repetition is presented as a space in which time, cultural dependencies and transcendence can be investigated. Three authors are discussed in this context. Freud finds repetition to be a disease symptom that is triggered by a failure to gratify instinct. Nietzsche emphasises the impossibility to construct an ego that is transparent to itself, and uses the idea of eternal returns to dispel the illusion of a holistic ego. Kierkegaard views repetition as a process that unifies particular experiences into a continuous whole that makes it possible to an individual to undertake a positive auto-creation.