The Repetition Compulsion
Someone who periodically reads this blog recently asked me to produce something dedicated to the repetition compulsion. I have taken this concept up in a few other spaces, though have not yet taken the time to fully represent the theory in its own post. I will admit, before we start, the idea of taking that on conceptually brings out a bit of discomfort. The notion of the repetition compulsion and the way I use and understand it is one that was largely given to me rather than worked through or discovered. As such, I think there is a question of ownership and authenticity that makes it feel awkward and intimidating to sit down and write something which might not contain a single original thought or idea of my own. There is also the old Oedipal difficulty in resisting the urge to take over. I can note at once a sense of not wanting to engage in an act of patricide by invading territory owned by those who have influenced me, while also not wanting to escape from the maternal loving care of the intellectual spaces they have carved out in which I can comfortably nestle. Then, on top of all that, is the awareness of the fact that at least some subset of the people who have stumbled upon this space have also largely shared teachers, supervisors, and a lot of the same intellectual spaces, which even more directly than the previously mentioned authenticity piece, raises an internal argument about fraudulence and appropriation. That all said, I think I will resign myself to recognizing that those not interested or already finding these ideas pretty well tread in their own thinking can take of it what they will and discard what they won’t, while also entertaining that perhaps writing about the idea more directly might in fact elicit some original thinking about the concept. So I will trudge along, while also pointing out—for those who care to witness it—in as much as I have already started to write about it, I am also already writing from within it.
As with many of the concepts we wrestle with in psychotherapy, the repetition compulsion begins with Sigmund Freud and his 1914 paper on “Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through”. In this paper, Freud strikingly identifies the ways in which his forays into analysis have observed a tendency in the patient to act out that which they cannot remember. This is Freud continuing to elaborate on his development of the concept of transference and what it is we are actually witnessing (later theory might suggest something more like being invited into) as the client free associates and plays something out in the therapeutic encounter. It is a remarkably sensitive rendering of the idea of defense and the subtle and overt ways in which a client might go about “defending himself against the progress of the analysis”. Hopefully even the most intense Freud skeptics can appreciate the fact that rather than dismiss those defenses as an unnecessary interference to his method, Freud was sensitive enough to bracket his own biases and recognize these actions playing out in the field as connected to and representative of what the client was actually bringing into the work and might be playing out in all of their significant relationships.
For Freud, despite the nominal perception of psychotherapy being “talk therapy”, the real demonstration of what the client is there to “work on” comes up via the process of “reproducing instead of remembering”. It is much more in the way the client says something than what he says. This may be something having to do with tone, syntax, lexicon, gestures, affect, or any of the other ways we go about cuing what it is we might really be thinking or feeling in a discussion. More importantly for Freud the client “reproduces according to the conditions of the resistance”. Of course, this might all beg the question of “what ought we to do about all of this” both as clinically and as individuals who are prone to producing these kinds of enactments in our own relationships. Before we go there, let’s think about some other manifestations of this tendency to repeat.
Pivoting to the world of philosophy briefly, Freud seemingly betrays some of his exposure to and philosophical influence in the title of his piece. This language of recollecting and repeating is the very language used by Kierkegaard in his notions of repetition. Perhaps one (over simplified) way of understanding this language as Kierkegaard uses it, is the one who recollects lives out their repetitions backwards, through habit and mindless mechanical representation, whereas the one who repeats carries their past forward creatively. As always with Kierkegaard, there is a spiritual dimension to this, as well as something having to do with willfulness and a desire to live into one’s subjectivity in a meaningful way. Nietzsche, comparatively, brings in a different kind of ethical dimension to repetition. For Nietzsche the possibility of the eternal recurrence is a thought experiment designed to interrogate the degree to which we would affirm our own existence. Are we living such that we would dare to claim this life as our own and is a failure to engage this project actively that which ultimately dooms us to actual, mindless repetition.
Heidegger, as is so often the case, is where this culminates into a language and philosophical system which attempts to understand and in some way even “make use” to repetition as a quality of the ontological experience of being. Similar to Kierkegaard, Heidegger sees repetition as an inevitability which is largely determined by the degree of our willingness to take it over, to live those repetitions authentically. Temporality is the foundation of being. We live through time and time lives through us. We can do this blindly, in a way that is overdetermined by the influence of our environment and the way things have always been done, or we can demand of ourselves an encounter with the existentially anxiety producing aspects of existence—a turn to a kind of crass individualism and confrontation with the finitude of our existence.
Coming back to psychoanalysis, though taken up by a variety of other theorists, two major developments in my approach and understanding of the concept come via Ronald Fairbairn and Hans Loewald. Fairbairn’s shift in thinking was an essential one in the development of the object relations school and the British Independent tradition within the history of psychoanalysis. In his texts, through concepts like the libidinal object and the rejecting object, Fairbairn placed the emphasis on the libidinal impulses not on drives but on the fundamental need for relationships. For Fairbairn, we are not intrapsychically determined by the degree of frustration and satisfaction we experience via our drives in a isolated and walled-off sort of way, but that these kinds of psychosexual needs are manifestations of an intense desire for connection and relatedness. The repetition compulsion then comes to incorporate not just a transference enactment of thwarted sexual and aggressive longings and desires, but failures in human connection and contact and the ability to be nurtured and tended to by the foundational relationships in our lives, reproducing the dynamics of early relationships in later ones with others and with ourselves.
Loewald extends Freud’s thinking in “Mourning and Melancholia”, focusing on the role of mourning and grief in resolving the repetition compulsion contained within its tendency to reproduce itself via the Oedipal Complex (which is to say via internalized conflicts in all their representations). Loewald, a student of philosophy prior to pursuing his doctorate and work in psychiatry, brings Kierkegaard’s notions of repetition into play in the psychoanalytic world here. Grief and mourning, as they manifest in the therapeutic encounter and the working through of past and present conflicts, creates the possibility of letting go of archaic attachments in the pursuit of new ways of organizing our experience of the world. In a return to Freud that borrows on Kierkegaard’s language, Loewald emphasizes the idea of creatively living forward our repetitions, rather than unconsciously reproducing them.
All these thinkers went on to largely inform contemporary theorizing, with its emphasis on transference-countertransference and intersubjective/relational dynamics. Though the language of the repetition compulsion is not always used, the ways in which these thinkers emphasize the creative use of self in the therapeutic relationship demands that one have a sense of how they show up in relationship with others and be able to use the instrument of their own being in a manner which invites the possibility for another to join you in that process of creative self-discovery.
By way of pointing to what we might “do” about this, or said more authentically how we might “be” with it, this is where any advocacy I have made in the past for good therapy and supervision comes from (as well as active engagement in relative theory). We discover the other’s repetition through the felt sense of what it is like to be with another. This may mean an awareness of how our respective repetitions are soliciting some specific reaction from one another, a sly awareness that we notice it not playing to our own sensitivities, or ways in which it feels like both of you are being pulled into an enactment in which the dialectical elements of the repetition are being overwhelmed by some other profound absence. This only works if we have some sense of our own instrument and the ways in which it attunes to others. So the repetition, both for the client and for the therapist, can be a way into phenomenology, approaching a description of how things are happening more so than what is happening.
Why and how that matters for therapy may be obvious, but I want to raise again the point I hinted at back in the beginning when I mentioned we would need to come back to Freud. The reader may have noticed that something about repetition as I am describing it here seems inescapable. That, even in the most optimistic sense, Loewald deigns we at best learn to creatively live our repetition forward. Freud was here from the jump, noting in his own text that insight is not about abandoning our repetitive compulsions, but about bringing about a cognitive shift in which the repressed memories driving the enactments can be better understood, allowing us to consciously engage the repetition compulsion as it is happening, rather than being abandoned to the intensity of its current. Contemporary theory would likely amplify the idea that this process is not just about the restoration of lost memories, but is an embodied felt process. That we have to account for disowned or isolated affects and the interpersonal bearings in which all of this takes place.
Which is simply to say, in response to the question of “What do we do with the repetition compulsion?”, is to notice it. And even more sensitively, notice how it is working with in and on the relationship, which means attending to our own culpability in its becoming enacted. The point is not to judge and induce shame, or encounter it merely intellectually. Those are the forms of avoidance many of us already use to avoid being in it. Like the client, for them to know how to be in it differently, we have to show them how, which means owning our responsibility of needing to creatively carry it forward. I recently, in rereading some other pieces by Freud, suddenly had the stunning realization that the repetition is not just about something in our lives that needs to be grieved. Resistance and therapeutic impasses are themselves ungrieved defenses against inviting some feeling, some sense of loss, or encountering the sheer unbearable weight of existence. Doing therapy is not just about the client’s grief. It is about the ways in which grief, or the defense against it, is actively working in the relationship. On both participants.
This brings me back to two quotes I return to often in the writing I do. The first is Elvin Semrad’s, which I’m paraphrasing based on how I’ve heard others share it: “The point of therapy is not to make the unbearable bearable, but to show that we can bear that which is unbearable.” The other is from Edgar Levenson’s “Shoot the Messenger” paper, which goes: “Ultimately, the patient doesn’t learn from us how to deal with the world. The patient learns to deal with us in order to better deal with the world.”
I think something about how we experience the repetition compulsion exists at the intersection of those two quotes. We allow the unbearable to emerge in the therapy, not to reframe or strategize what to do with it, but because it is an unavoidable feature of what it means to carry on being oneself in the world. We learn to recognize our responsibility in its manifestation, in ourselves and others, and must free ourselves to be confronted with this impossible truth over and over again. This has to happen in relationship so that we can be confronted with the immense loneliness of that project. But still, we find solace. Where learn not that our original wounds can be restored, but that we can live in a way that tends to them creatively. We learn that the bitterest loneliness only awakens in the company of one who has felt true companionship. And we bear, not by assuming some underlying bearability of all things, but by always challenging ourselves to find the courage to bear witness.
