The repetition of another person’s word, with silence, is one of the most frequent symptoms in the language pathology. Traditionally named “echo”, this repetition is understood as a non intentional production, unconscious, that is not representative of an objective knowledge of reality. It is only un echo: a useless speech.
Based on more modern linguistic perspective, which takes the word as something from the discoursive level (which bets on polissemy of the word and on the subject heterogeneity), repetition can have an other interpretation. From the concept of enunciation origins the idea of incompleteness of the subject and of the language, determining for language a genesis that is nothing else but sprouting of functioning of the symbolic type where repetition becomes a foundating event. Rescued by this linguistic, repetition remains, however, demanding analisys. The language pathology shows a repetition whose desting is different: far from noticing a founding occurence, it reveals its evil power, once it takes from the word its possibility to succeed a saying. Then, this event has another nature and about this, psychoanalisis has lots to say.
The repetition loses its original character and means the pathologic. The conservative side of instincts filling with smoke the heterogeneity of the subject, blocking any anarchy in the instinct functioning, source of the necessary difference. The word is an invention: because its polissemic character its always an new solution. When the child repeats the other person’s word she/he is making her/his own, establishing the difference. In the pathology, on the other hand, the child doesn’t make the other person’s word her/his own word, this way, it is not an invention because the “new” doesn’t exist anymore. The conditional dialetic between invention/ repetition ends causing the death of the word.