Is there a “1920 turn”?

Another reading, 100 years from Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Abstract

The value and meaning of a text depends not only on its content or its author, but also on the readings that are proposed to address it. This text begins with a brief presentation of different historical ways of “reading” Freud in Argentina. Then, we try to analyze a reading, introduced in the 1990s, which interprets “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” as a “turn” that would lead to valuing previous texts as mere “antecedents”. We criticize some aspects of this type of approach based on some principles of historio-graphical practice and historical research on psychoanalysis. Finally, we propose a new reading that would allow to interpret the 1920 writing not only as a turning point, but also as a new response to old problems related to the concept of repetition. We will try to justify that these problems not only cross the Freudian “work” transversally, but even the entire history of the clinic of neuroses.