ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to discuss one aspect of the repetition compulsion which Freud first introduced in 1920 (Freud 1920). The question of the repetition compulsion as a whole has been discussed in a number of papers. I would refer especially to those of Kubie (1939), Hendrick (1947), and Bibring (1943). Freud (1920) showed how neurotics, and, as he put it, ‘some normal people’ could be seen to be constantly, as if under pressure of a compulsion, reexperiencing situations in their lives which brought them only unhappiness, and the repetition of which therefore seemed to ‘override the pleasure principle’. He spoke of such people as giving the impression of being possessed by a daemonic compulsion, adding, however, ‘but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences’; however, later in the same paragraph, he adds the following interesting point:
This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. (p. 22)
It seems to me that we all, in our analytic practices, see a number of patients who show a marked tendency again and again in their lives to go through repetitive unhappy experiences, apparently passively. In this communication
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I am going to limit myself to considering this one aspect of the repetition compulsion. It will be remembered that it was the discovery of the repetition compulsion that was one of the factors that led Freud to put forward his theory of the death instinct. In my concluding remarks I shall try to make a very tentative connection between the apparently passive repetition compulsion and his theory of the death instinct. In this chapter I shall isolate and consider one group of patients who show markedly this type of repetition, that is, those patients whose repetition is blind, unconscious, very compulsive, apparently passively experienced and not provoked by them and almost invariably unpleasant in its results; it is very noticeable in their history and in their current relationships when they come into analysis.
