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Chance

354 bytes added, 13:12, 4 August 2006
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== Sigmund Freud ==
Freud has often been accused of a crude determinism, since no slip or blunder, no matter how apparently insignificant, is ever ascribed to chance (''chance'').
 
Indeed, Freud wrote, 'I believe in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events."<ref>Freud, 1901: 257</ref>
 
---
 
[[Sigmund Freud]] is often accused of crude determinism.
[[Freud]] almost never ascribes accident events to chance.
In the [[symbolic]] [[order]], there is no such thing as pure chance.
 
----
In the seminar of 1964, [[Lacan]] uses [[Aristotle]]'s distinction between two kinds of chance to illustrate this distinction between the [[real]] and the [[symbolic]].
In the second book of the ''Physics'', where the concept of causality (see [[cause]]) is discussed, [[Aristotle]] explores the role of chance and fortune in [[causality]].
He distinguishes between two types of [[chance]]: [[automaton]], which refers to chance events in the world at large, and ''[[tyche]]'', which designates [[chance]] insofar as it affects agents who are capable of moral [[action]].---
 [[Lacan]] redefines [[automaton]] as "the network of signifiers", thus locating it in the [[symbolic order]].
The term thus comes to designate those phenomena which seem to be chance but which are in truth the insistence of the [[signifier]] in determining the [[subject]].
[[Automaton]] is not truly arbitrary: only the [[real]] is truly arbitrary, since "the real is beyond the automaton."<ref>{{S11}} p.59</ref>
--- The [[real]] is aligned with ''[[tyche]]'', which [[Lacan]] redefines as "the encounter with the real".
[[Tyche]] thus refers to the incursion of the [[real]] into the [[symbolic]] [[order]]: unlike the ''[[automaton]]'', which is the [[structure]] of the [[symbolic]] order which determines the [[subject]], ''[[tyche]] '' is purely arbitrary, beyond the determinations of the [[symbolic]] [[order]].
It is a knock on the door that interrupts a [[dream]], and on a more painful level it is [[trauma]].
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