A Spiral Movement

A spiral movement: this is how I sometimes visualize this process: the spiral moves steadily and cyclically at the vertical of the same points. A spiral flattened to one single plane becomes a circle-a purely repetitive circle. No thought can escape repetition, for no thought can escape what I call its 'demand', and which is but the projection, on an intellectual level, of our desire. A fruitful thought would be the one that could, at least at times, rise from the plane of the circle, and transform its circular movement into a deepening one.

A Metapsychology Put to the Test of Anxiety (1981), Jean Laplanche