Urverdrängung

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (30)

1. #01

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_171"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0192"></span>**repression**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

   Primal repression (Ger. Urverdrängung) is the alienation of desire when need is articulated in demand (E, 286). It is also the unconscious signifying chain.

2. #02

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.205

   **11**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that biological need (hunger as the oral drive) undergoes a transformational sublation into signifier-mediated demands and desires through Imaginary and Symbolic mediations, and that this Freudian-Lacanian thesis is reinforced by Hegel's (via Kojève) dialectic of recognition, wherein bare survival becomes inextricably entangled with intersubjective recognition—while the ego's resistance to recognizing the unconscious is recast as the Imaginary blocking Symbolic (full) speech.

   the unconscious initially comes into being, according to Freud, with the first, 'primal' repression of an early drive representative. This primally repressed representation thereafter functions as a center of psychical gravity attracting to itself other representations

3. #03

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.483

   The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 557 *IK Schreber's Way*

   Theoretical move: The passage formalizes the Lacanian theory of psychosis through the paternal metaphor: Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father leaves a hole in the Other and in phallic signification, which is demonstrated through a close structural reading of Schreber's delusion as manifesting a Creator/Creature/Created triad mapped onto the R schema.

   The primordial Bejahung thus also bears on the signifier... isolated as the term for an original perception by the name 'sign,' Zeichen.

4. #04

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.572

   The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *Structure and the Subject* > / /. *Where Is Id?*

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the three seemingly incompatible Freudian propositions about the id (its lack of organization, its foreclosure of negation, and the silence of the death drives within it) can only be reconciled by recourse to the function of the signifier, thereby displacing Lagache's personalist framework and grounding the subject—and primal judgment—in the structural materiality of the signifier rather than in ego autonomy.

   He conceived of the judgment of attribution, then, as instated on the basis of Bejahung alone.

5. #05

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.597

   The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus is neither a fantasy, an object, nor an anatomical organ but a signifier—the privileged signifier that conditions meaning effects as a whole—and uses this to reframe the castration complex, the phallic phase, and the distinction between need, demand, and desire as structural effects of the subject's subjection to the signifier and to the Other's locus.

   What is thus alienated in needs constitutes an Urverdrängung [primal repression], as it cannot, hypothetically, be articulated in demand; it nevertheless appears in an offshoot that presents itself in man as desire (das Begehren).

6. #06

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.598

   The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

   Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the privileged signifier of desire precisely by being veiled—its Aufhebung (disappearance/raising) institutes the subject's Spaltung and governs the differential relations between being/having, demand/desire, and the asymmetrical positions of the sexes under the phallic mark.

   the part of this being that is alive in the urverdrangt [primally repressed] finds its signifier by receiving the mark of the phallus's Verdrangung [repression] (owing to which the unconscious is language).

7. #07

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.612

   In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses his critique of Jones' theory of symbolism to positively establish that metaphor operates through signifier-substitution (not semantic displacement from concrete to abstract), that the phallus functions as the signifier of the subject's lack-of-being, and that Urverdrängung names the fundamental reduplication of the subject by the signifier—thereby grounding analytic symbolism in structural linguistics rather than developmental psychology.

   the most fundamental of them being the Urverdrangung [primal repression] that Freud always emphasized—namely, the subject's reduplication brought on by discourse, though that reduplication remains masked by the multiplication of what it evokes as entities.

8. #08

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.709

   The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > GRAPH 3

   Theoretical move: The passage completes Lacan's Graph of Desire by articulating the upper chain's key mathemes—S(Ⓐ), ($◇a), ($◇D)—showing how the drive, fantasy, and the castration complex jointly structure the barred subject's relation to jouissance and the lack in the Other, while insisting that the very prohibition of jouissance by the Law is what constitutes the subject as barred rather than merely absent from it.

   our attention is now drawn to the subjective status of the signifying chain in the unconscious or, better, in primal repression (Urverdrängung).

9. #09

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.771

   On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" by Jean Hyppolite

   Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" argues that the asymmetry between affirmation (as Ersatz of unification/Eros) and negation (as Nachfolge of the destructive drive) is what makes symbolic thought possible: negation, as a concrete attitude that generates the symbol of negation, creates a margin of independence from both repression and the pleasure principle, enabling the ego's recognition of the unconscious—always in negative form—and thus grounding the very genesis of judgment and thought.

   all of the repressed can once again be taken up and reutilized in a sort of suspension, and that, in some sense, instead of being dominated by the instincts of attraction and expulsion, a margin for thought can be generated

10. #10

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.814

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTES TO "RESPONS E TO JEAN HYPPOLITE' S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' "

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial/translatorial notes to Lacan's "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung'," clarifying terminological choices, providing bibliographic references, and glossing key concepts (foreclosure, ek-sistence, acting out, primordial symbolization) as they appear in the Écrits text—without advancing a sustained independent theoretical argument.

    In this text by Freud, the affective is conceived of as that which, of a primordial symbolization, preserves its effects right down to the discursive structuration.

11. #11

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.871

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts

    Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

    The Name-of-the-Father (instance of the symbolic, or dead, Father) and primal repression

12. #12

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.887

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

    Urverdrangung, 690, 710, 816, 868

13. #13

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.340

    Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" to establish Verwerfung (foreclosure) as the precise opposite of primal Bejahung—a symbolic abolition that is structurally distinct from repression—while articulating how the triad of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real can reconstitute psychopathological theory, exemplified through the Wolf Man's hallucination and his relation to castration.

    Verwerfung is exactly what opposes the primal Bejahung and constitutes as such what is expelled.

14. #14

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.341

    Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes Freud's Verneinung to establish that what is excluded from primordial symbolization (Verwerfung/foreclosure) does not enter the unconscious but returns in the Real—as hallucination, erratic castration, or acting out—while simultaneously critiquing ego psychology's failure to grasp this structure.

    the primordial condition for something from the real to come to offer itself up to the revelation of being... it is only afterwards that anything whatsoever can be found there as existent

15. #15

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.575

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *Structure and the Subject* > / /. *Where Is Id?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topology of the subject in the signifying structure is legible in the formal peculiarities of negation-particles across languages, and that the subject's place is constituted by a signifying elision—a void or cut in the chain—which is the primordial matrix of Verneinung (negation) and the condition of possibility for both defense and the death drive.

    The earliest mode of signifying elision, which I am trying to conceptualize here as the matrix of *Verneinung* [negation], asserts the subject negatively, by preparing the void in which he finds his place.

16. #16

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.754

    On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Science and Truth

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of metalanguage—grounded in the self-referential speech of truth—is co-extensive with Urverdrängung, and uses this to differentiate how magic, religion, and science each relate "truth as cause," showing that only psychoanalysis, via the subject of science, can rigorously articulate this relation without disavowal or deferral.

    This lack of truth about truth—necessitating as it does all the traps that metalanguage, as sham and logic, falls into—is the rightful place of Urverdrangung, that is, of primal repression which draws toward itself all the other repressions

17. #17

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.266

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO TRE TRANSFERENCE

    Theoretical move: The Wolf Man case is used to demonstrate how the subject is constituted around a primal repressed signifier (Urverdrängung) — a traumatic non-meaning that cannot be substituted, and which structures the dialectic of desire through the Other, while the subject's gaze-fascination in the dream materialises the representative function of loss.

    the logical necessity of that moment in which the subject as X can be constituted only from the Urverdrdngung, from the necessary fall of this first signifier

18. #18

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

    if he spoke about Urverdrängung, primal repression, it is indeed because precisely the true, the good, everyday repression, well then, precisely it is not first, it is second.

19. #19

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.20

    POWERS OF HORROR > AT THE LIMIT OF PRIMAL REPRESSION

    Theoretical move: Kristeva theorizes abjection as the "object" of primal repression—a pre-subjective, pre-objectal residue that precedes and conditions narcissism, the sign, and sublimation, positioning it topologically between the somatic symptom and the sublime, and showing how it erupts as a narcissistic crisis whenever secondary repression's symbolic resources are overwhelmed.

    a repression that one might call 'primal' has been effected prior to the springing forth of the ego, of its objects and representations

20. #20

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.27

    POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTEN

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that great modern literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Céline) constitutes the privileged site where abjection is symbolized and traversed, and that the aesthetic act of speaking/writing the abject—at the boundary of the symbolic construct and primal repression—performs a catharsis that simultaneously discloses and partially redeems what escapes signification.

    retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless 'primacy' constituted by primal repression

21. #21

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.222

    POWERS OF HORROR > NOTES > 2. SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus for Kristeva's chapter on phobia situates the theoretical architecture of abjection at the intersection of Freudian object-loss, primal repression, and the semiotic — arguing that the phobic/abject object is located on the trail opened by Freud's pre-ego defensive modalities, which depend on symbolic function and language.

    Does this have to do with defensive capabilities that are elaborated along with primal repression? With the power of the symbolic alone, always already present but working within its pre-sign, pre-meaning (trans-sign, trans-meaning) modality, which I call 'semiotic'?

22. #22

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.151

    11.

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's sustained subordination of affect to the signifier/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rests on a selective and partially erroneous reading of Freud's 1915 metapsychology, and proposes instead (following Green) that affect and ideational structure are primordially indistinct—their separation being a secondary abstraction produced by repression itself.

    submitted to repression (both 'primal' and secondary or 'proper' repression [Urverdrängung and Verdrängung]) as Repräsentanzen, not Vorstellungen.

23. #23

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.162

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect—centered on the claim that affect is not repressed but "unfastened," displaced, and estranged from signifiers—constitutes a principled theoretical position rather than a neglect of affect; crucially, this entails that the parlêtre's affective life is irreducibly alienated from signifier-mediated subjectivity, such that there is no representational rapport between affect and signifier.

    in primal repression, a Repräsentanz qua Triebrepräsentanz is condemned to unconsciousness, thereafter to be represented in the psyche by other ideas qua Vorstellungen.

24. #24

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.164

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that affects are irreducibly entangled with signifying systems (primal and secondary repression both involve displacement of affect), such that the discourse of the analyst produces a single affect—anxiety about one's status as object—by hystericizing the parlêtre, while lalangue names the pre-syntactic, libidinal substrate of language that persists into analytic free association and reveals the unconscious's private, nonsensical play with the mother tongue.

    the split between an affect and its nonrepresentative 'representations' introduced with the originary advent of the mediation of signifiers (this mediation amounts to a primal repression of affects through irreversibly displacing them into the foreign territories of symbolic orders)

25. #25

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.293

    13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

    Theoretical move: This index chunk maps the theoretical terrain of a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affects, tracking key debates around unconscious affects, the priority of signifiers over affects, the translation problems around Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and Lacan's neologisms (lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment) as attempts to articulate the affective-linguistic interface — while situating these debates in relation to neuroscience, neurobiology, and continental philosophy.

    primary repression and secondary repression/repression proper, 125–26

26. #26

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.238

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kant-to-Hegel move requires understanding the form/content gap as itself reflected back into content as "primordial repression," and maps this onto Lacan's sexuation formulas (form = non-all, matter = universal with exception), ultimately driving toward the cross-cap as the topological figure adequate to a radical antagonism irreducible to the Möbius strip.

    This exclusion which establishes the form itself is the 'primordial repression' (Ur-Verdrängung), and no matter how much we bring out all the repressed content, this gap of primordial repression persists.

27. #27

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.40

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

    what is 'primordially repressed' is the binary signifier (that of Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz)

28. #28

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.174

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

    The Freudian 'subject of the Unconscious' emerges only when a key aspect of the subject's phenomenal (self-)experience (his 'fundamental fantasy') becomes inaccessible to him, that is, is 'primordially repressed.'

29. #29

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

    It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

    Theoretical move: Zupančič inverts the standard account of religion vs. drive sexuality: Christianity does not repress partial drives but rather represses the *link* between enjoyment and sexuality, because what is truly threatening is not perverse jouissance but the ontological negativity of the sexual relation (the missing signifier), which registers in reality as the unconscious. Humanity is thus not an exception to Nature but the site where Nature's own lack of sexual knowledge acquires its singular epistemic—unconscious—form.

    what was transmitted to them was precisely the gap of the Urverdrängung as constitutive of knowledge.

30. #30

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

    It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

    Freud was led to introduce the hypothesis according to which what we usually refer to as repression is actually and already an 'after-pressure' (Nachdrängen). Actual repression or repression proper is already based on repression; repression is constitutively redoubled.