The compulsion to repeat: An introduction

ABSTRACT

The Repetition Compulsion has been the source of much controversy and perplexity. From it's clinical introduction in 1914 in Remembering, Repeating and Working Through to it's metapsychological elaboration in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it has occupied a central position in Freud's thinking. Especially in regard to his later work, it can be seen to be intrinsic to his final dual instinct theory, his theories of the Death Instinct, trauma, memory, binding and action and to the clinical challenges and theoretical changes that led to the formulation of his second topography. This paper will trace the evolution of the concept in Freud and in certain post-Freudian authors, especially Edward Bibring, Winnicott and Scarfone.

KEYWORDS:

• Repetition
• trauma
• memory
• death instinct
• binding

Notes

1 While this quote from his 1937 “Constructions” paper shows Freud reaffirming the importance for the cure of undoing the effects of childhood repression, the raison d’etre of that paper was his acknowledgement that it was not always possible to do so. See Levine (2011) for further discussion.

2 See Strachey’s footnote 1, p. 149 in Freud (1918).

3 “An ‘anti-cathexis’ on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced” (Freud 1920, 30).

4 Adaptation was an important concern of the ego psychologists, as indicated, for example, by Hartmann’s (1939) famous monograph.

5 The movement towards representation that reflects and relieves this pressure is what I have referred to as “the representational imperative” (Levine 2012).

6 This is taken up in detail in Levine (forthcoming).