Repetition Compulsion - Freud and The Repetition Compulsion

Freud and The Repetition Compulsion

Sigmund Freud's use of the concept was 'articulated...for the first time, in the article of 1914, Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten ('Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.' Here he noted how 'the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it....For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical toward his parents' authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor'.

He explored the repetition compulsion further in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describing four aspects of repetitive behavior, all of which seemed odd to him from the point of view of the mind's quest for pleasure/avoidance of unpleasure.

The first was the way 'dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident' rather than, for example, 'show the patient pictures from his healthy past'.

The second came from children's play. Freud reported observing a child throw his favorite toy from his crib, become upset at the loss, then reel the toy back in, only to repeat this action. Freud theorized that the child was attempting to master the sensation of loss 'in allowing his mother to go away without protesting', but asked in puzzlement 'How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?'.

The third was the way (noted in 1914) that the patient, exploring in therapy a repressed past, 'is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of...remembering it as something belonging to the past....the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way'.

The fourth was the so-called "destiny neurosis", manifested in 'the life-histories of men and women... an essential character-trait which remains always the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experience'.

All such activities appeared to Freud to contradict the organism's search for pleasure, and therefore 'to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat - something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides'. Following this line of thought, he would come to stress that ' an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things '; and so to arrive eventually at his concept of the death drive.

Along the way, however, Freud had in addition considered a variety of more purely psychological explanations for the phenomena of the repetition compulsion which he had observed. Traumatic repetitions could be seen as the result of an attempt to retrospectively "master" the original trauma, a child's play as an attempt to turn passivity into activity: 'At the outset he was in a passive situation...but by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part'.

At the same time, the repetition of unpleasant experiences in analysis could be considered 'unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other . In the second edition of 1921, he extended the point, stating explicitly that transference repetitions 'are of course the activities of instincts intended to lead to satisfaction; but no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led only to unpleasure'.

Five years later, in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, he would quietly revise his earlier definition - 'There is no need to be discouraged by these emendations...so long as they enrich rather than invalidate our earlier views' - in his new formula on 'the power of the compulsion to repeat - the attraction exerted by the unconscious prototypes upon the repressed instinctual process'.