For Rui Boy

“Freud is inviting us to distinguish between something he calls remembering, which is presumably veracious and potentially transformative, and something called an action, a repeated action in which the so-called patient – like an actor with a script, or a figure in a dream – unwittingly performs something from his past. That he knows he is repeating something, but that he doesn’t know he is repeating something from the past means that unwittingly he is living in the present as if it were the past (though it is not an ‘as if’ to him). The patient who repetitively re-enacts something from the past clearly has no distance from it, because for him there is no it from which he could take his distance. Freud is alerting us to the idea that there is nothing that the individual defends himself against more than the construction of distance from the traumatic past. “

Adam Phillips, Close-Ups History Workshop Journal Issue 57 © 2004, Page 142