ABSTRACT
This suggests that two different kinds of phenomena can show up in the transference: transference as the elaboration of a world, and transference as the disruption of that world. Freud cannot see this distinction because he thinks he has discovered a primordial principle that explains all repetition. Even worse, this principle gets in the way of a real explanatory account. Freud cites some familiar examples of neurotic repetition: the benefactor who is abandoned time after time by each of his protégés; the man whose friendships all end in betrayal; the lover who passes through the same stages in a love affair over and over again.23 In the past, Freud would have explained these phenomena as dynamic outcomes of attempts to achieve wishful gratifications under the constraints of the external world. The repetition would itself be explained in terms of other complex forces – the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Now repetition is ‘explained’ in terms of itself: these are all cited as instances of the compulsion to repeat. Freud thinks he is achieving a theoretical unification; in my opinion he is turning away from a diversity of phenomena.
