Mladen Dolar: Remembrance and repetition : Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis

To put together Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis in a title seems like putting together two different and completely divergent worlds that have no common ground if intersection, standing wide apart, so that any conjunction would seem to be forced and contrived.

And yet, despite the radically different context, one could disentangle a common agenda that is played out and where Freud, unwittingly no doubt, takes up a thread that was left suspended in the air by Kierkegaard. The themes that come to the fore are anamnesis and repeating. The comparison is based primarily on Freud’s Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through and Kierkegaard’s Repetition (repeating).

From the author’s analysis it comes out, that Freud, if red properly, should be placed on the side of repeating.

About the Author:

Mladen Dolar (born 29 January 1951) is a Slovene philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural theorist and film critic.

Dolar was born in Maribor as the son of the literary critic Jaro Dolar. In 1978 he graduated in Philosophy and French language at the University of Ljubljana, under the supervision of the renowned philosopher Božidar Debenjak. He later studied at the University of Paris VII and the University of Westminster.

Dolar was the co-founder, together with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, whose main goal is to achieve a synthesis between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the philosophy of German idealism.

Dolar has taught at the University of Ljubljana since 1982. In 2010 Dolar began his tenure as an Advising Researcher in theory at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands.[4] His main fields of expertise are the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (on which he has written several books, including a two-volume interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind) and French structuralism. He is also a music theoretician and film critic.

Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, a study of the voice in its linguistic, metaphysical, physical, ethical, and political dimensions, has been translated into six languages.