Sigmund Freud: repetition compulsion from Beyond the Pleasure Principle
“Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats an event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This "re-living" can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucinated.”
This psychological phenomenon happens to me everyday especially before I fall a sleep. I cannot control my mind to re-living a situation that leaded a high pressure or dissatisfied for me. It is a struggle and anxious process. Because if I am re-living a situation which needs decision/choice I will try every possibility in my mind and think out the outcome even that situation had passed. I still feel it there something I should not do at that moment or I should choose another decision or... It is like a brain storm with endless chaos. And during this uncontrollable repetition I might feel guilty, shame, awkward, mostly bad emotion. In Sigmund Fred’s essay “ Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, he thinks repetition compassion appears unconsciously base on repressed, traumatic material in life as a kind of self-repairing. He believes the repetition compulsion has the significance towards the preservation of life, which works as sexual instincts. . “Sexual instincts reproduce primitive states of the living being, but they aim they strive for is the copulation of two individual protozoa, the repetition." Even my mental disease is not that bad and I do go through this struggle re-living action everyday. However, this “repetition compulsion” has the ability of repairing.
By the time reading <<The Artist-Philosopher: Deleuze, Nietzsche and the critical art of Affirmation>> and <<Art as abstract Machine>>, I collected some references.
"Art is not representational, but is an experimental process by which the form of representation is overcame, and through which something new emerges." Base on this idea I start to try to catch the "notion of value" during my art making process. ----> which turned to be progressive value I called to myself. (the value of : time and human effort)
"Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it."
People always surprised about the nature strength --- time: changing seasons, growing life, disappearing... Even in scientific area, time is a very important topic (Theory of relativity) in recent century. Combing time and human effort as important materials in my work and let them be explored by viewer is one of the intention of my artworks.
Gill Deleuze <<Difference and Repetition>>
"As Deleuze notes, representation might try to provide a concept of repetition by nothing that while the elements that make up the repetition are identical with one another, 'a change is produced in the mind which contemplate: a difference, something new in the mind'."
Repetition progress with human effort and time which are spent in there. While people concentrate on making repetitive object the whole process creates an inner space for the producer to think, compare, represent the stuff in real life and the change happening in mind. Under this circumstance, the idea and knowledge support will be enhanced.
"Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view."
"Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind."
Think about :Creating artwork relate to phenomenology based on referencing real experiences (first-person perspective) or intentionally finding resource from other people/media/news. They are different point to start. What will happen in creation because of these different starting point?