ABSTRACT
Childhood origins Sometimes people who have not felt loved in childhood are attracted to people in adulthood who are not good at loving. Freud called this ‘repetition compulsion’, meaning an unconscious compulsion to repeat the emotional pain of the past. Fairbairn, another famous analyst, talked of the allure of repeating painful childhood relationships because in some sense the person is still trying to work things out. Their life force is locked in their childhood relationships with emotionally depriving parent figures, and also their hope. For many people, it takes counselling or therapy to enable them to become aware of this replay, to grieve over that original pain and then to feel sufficiently supported to leave. It is only after this that they can realise that ‘once-in-a-blue-moon’ shows of affection are just not enough, that they deserve more than to be treated like this, and to understand that if they are not loved it is not because they are unlovable.
