ABSTRACT
Contriving unknowingly to repeat an especially painful experience in disguise, and more than once as circumstances permit, is a pattern of human behaviour sufficiently distinct to deserve a technical name: episodic traumatic reliving. Sigmund Freud opened the way to understanding this bizarre phenomenon even though he never dealt with it clinically or even recognized it as an entity unto itself. Freud’s psychoanalytical rule of a childhood original for every adult symptom or neurosis brought him only mixed theoretical and therapeutic gain. On the down side in particular it ruled out traumatic reliving, in which an unprecedented, shattering experience is re-experienced close to the bone in all its haunting specificity. In 1914 Freud coined the term “repetition compulsion” to cover patients in analysis acting out feelings or attitudes from their infancy that were never clearly conscious: such, he astutely observed, was their way of remembering. In Freud’s traumatic theory of the 1890s, neurosis was a chronic reliving of traumas loosely defined.
