Repetition Compulsion - Later Psychoanalytic Developments

Later Psychoanalytic Developments

It was in the latter, psychological form that the concept of the repetition compulsion passed into the psychoanalytic mainstream. Otto Fenichel in his "second generation" compendium The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis stressed two main kinds of neurotic repetition.

On the one hand, there were ' Repetitions of traumatic events for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery...seen first and most clearly in children's games', although the 'same pattern occurs in the repetitive dreams and symptoms of traumatic neurotics and in many similar little actions of normal persons who...repeat upsetting experiences a number of times before these experiences are mastered. Such traumatic repetitions could themselves appear in active or passive forms. In a passive form, one chooses his or her most familiar experiences consistently as a means to deal with problems of the past, believing that new experiences will be more painful than their present situation or too new and untested to imagine. In the active, participatory form, a person actively engages in behavior that mimics an earlier stressor, either deliberately or unconsciously, so that in particular events that are terrifying in childhood become sources of attraction in adulthood. For instance, a person who was spanked as a child may incorporate this into their adult sexual practices; or a victim of sexual abuse may attempt to seduce another person of authority in his or her life (such as their boss or therapist): an attempt at mastery of their feelings and experience, in the sense that they unconsciously want to go through the same situation but that it not result negatively as it did in the past.

On the other hand, there were ' Repetitions due to the tendency of the repressed to find an outlet '. Here the drive of the repressed impulse to find gratification brought with it a renewal of the original defence: 'the anxiety that first brought about the repression is mobilized again and creates, together with the repetition of the impulse, a repetition of the anti-instinctual measures'. Fenichel considered that 'Neurotic repetitions of this kind contain no metaphysical element....even the repetition of the most painful failure of the Oedipus complex in the transference during a psychoanalytic cure is not "beyond the pleasure principle"'.

Later writers would take very similar views. Eric Berne saw as central to his work 'the repetition compulsion which drives men to their doom, the power of death, according to Freud... places it in some mysterious biological sphere, when after all it is only the voice of seduction' - the seduction of the repressed and unconscious id.

Erik Erikson saw the destiny neurosis - the way 'that some people make the same mistakes over and over' - in the same light: 'the individual unconsciously arranges for variations of an original theme which he has not learned either to overcome or to live with'. Ego psychology would subsequently take for granted 'how rigidly determined our lives are - how predictable and repetitive...the same mistake over and over again'.

Object relations theory, stressing the way 'the transference is a live relationship...in the here-and-now of the analysis, repeating the way that the patient has used his objects from early in life' considered that 'this newer conception reveals a purpose... the repetition compulsion': thus 'unconscious hope may be found in repetition compulsion, when unresolved conflicts continue to generate attempts at solutions which do not really work... a genuine solution is found'.