2015 - Beyond The Death Drive - The Future of Repetition and Compulsion To Repeat in Psychopathology

Psychoanalytic Psychology © 2015 American Psychological Association
2015, Vol. 32, No. 4, 645– 668 0736-9735/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037859
BEYOND THE DEATH DRIVE:

The Future of “Repetition” and “Compulsion to
Repeat” in Psychopathology
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M. Andrew Holowchak, PhD Michael Lavin, PhD

Rider University, Lawrenceville Brooke Army Medical Center,
San Antonio, Texas
Literature on Freud’s use of “repetition” exists only insofar as it relates to

shedding light on “repetition compulsion.” Nevertheless, understanding Freud’s
use of “compulsion to repeat” is impossible without historical engagement, first,
with its development over time and, second, with its relation to Freud’s earlier
uses of repetition both in and outside of the clinic. This article is a critical
reading of Freud’s employment of both repetition and repetition compulsion.
We ask: How does compulsion to repeat differ from repetition? How do
compulsions to repeat, given as evidence of the death drive, differ from
compulsions to repeat that are consistent with the pleasure principle? Finally,
is compulsion to repeat salvageable?
Keywords: Freud, repetition, repetition compulsion
Context
Freud used “repetition” (Wiederholung) throughout his works, though in general polyse-
mously. In contrast, “compulsion to repeat” (Wiederholungszwang1) first occurred in
“Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), where it has specific senses in
the analytic setting. By the time he wrote “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920),
compulsion to repeat had become polysemic as well. In particular, the repetition com-
This article was published Online First March 23, 2015.

M. Andrew Holowchak, PhD, Department of Philosophy, Rider University, Lawrenceville;
Michael Lavin, PhD, Department of Behavioral Health, Intensive Outpatient Program, Brooke
Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas.
Michael Lavin, PhD, is now at the Department of Behavioral Health, General Leonard Wood
Army Community Hospital, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not representations of views
of the Department of Defense, Department of Army, or any federal agency.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to M. Andrew Holowchak, PhD,
Rider University, Lawrenceville, Department of Philosophy, New Academic Building, Law-
renceville, NJ 08648. E-mail: MHolowchak@hotmail.com
645
646 HOLOWCHAK AND LAVIN
pulsion gains a “daemonic” sense that signals a dark, significant shift in Freud’s meta-
psychological thinking—the introduction of his death drive, a doorway to Freud’s post-
Great-War hypotheses regarding aggression.
Literature on Freud’s use of compulsion to repeat, as it relates to the death drive, is
vast. The general consensus seems to be that Wiederholungszwang, apropos of the death
drive, is false step, for a simple reason: The death drive is false step.2 Critics, psychoan-
alysts among them, contend that psychoanalysis is better off without the death drive but
acknowledge that repetition, perhaps even in the form of compulsion to repeat, is an
unavoidable explanatory construct in psychoanalysis. Thus, some analysts, as we shall see
later, recommend severing the compulsion to repeat from Freud’s theory of drives but are
amenable to putting it to work in other areas of psychoanalysis. Still other analysts,
especially the French, continue to hold on to repetition and drive theory. They posit that
drive theory has, at least, clinical merit. A working analyst deprives himself of a complete
picture of his patients if he declines to conceptualize some clinical phenomena in terms of
drive theory, most especially the ubiquity of aggressive themes in the associations of
analysands.3
Much literature on Freud’s use of repetition, in contrast, exists only insofar as it relates
to shedding light on compulsion to repeat. Nevertheless, understanding compulsion to
repeat psychoanalytically is impossible without historical engagement with two facets of
psychoanalytic theory: (a) the compulsion to repeat’s development over time in Freud’s
work and (b) its relation to Freud’s earlier uses of repetition both in clinical work and in
psychoanalysis as a general psychology and as a scientific method of investigation. These
two facts regarding the development of compulsion to repeat over time and its relation to
Freud’s earlier uses of repetition have gone unexplored. Thus, we offer a reading of
Freud’s use of both repetition and compulsion to repeat. Specifically, we organize our
reading by asking these three questions: (a) How does compulsion to repeat differ from
repetition? (b) How do specific instances of compulsions to repeat, offered as evidence of
the death drive, differ from compulsions to repeat that are consistent with the pleasure
principle? and (c) Has Freud’s research on repetition and compulsion to repeat led to
fruitful paths of research in psychology today?
Overall, by tracing historically the development of Freud’s thoughts over time on
repetition and compulsion to repeat, we argue that Freud was mistaken to posit that
compulsion to repeat was adequate evidence of a death drive. Yet, that is not to say his
research on repetition and compulsion to repeat was sterile. It has sired much productive
and progressive research in the areas of modern-day psychopathology and, in general,
human mental development— especially memory. For that, Freud is to be praised.
Freud’s Early (Noncompulsive) Uses of “Repetition”
Freud’s earliest uses of repetition represent desires, often of a sexual sort, and are
consistent with his subsequent elaboration of the pleasure principle (first mentioned by
name in 1911 in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”). For
example, in Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud described a male patient’s
dream, reported as dreamt at the age of 4, in which the lawyer in charge of his recently
departed father’s will brought with him two large pears. One was given to a boy (on an
eligible interpretation, patient ⫽ boy); the other pear was placed on the sill. Upon waking,
the patient persistently kept asking his mother for the second pear, which he insisted was
on the sill. The pears, Freud said, symbolized the mother’s breasts, which he suckled as
BEYOND THE DEATH DRIVE 647
an infant, and the sill symbolized the projection of her breasts. Freud’s interpretation is
this: “Give (or show) me your breast again, Mother, that I used to drink from in the past.”
“In the past” is represented by the pear already eaten; “again” is represented by his present
desire for the other “pear.” Freud summed up, “The temporal repetition of an act is
regularly shown in dreams by the numerical multiplication of an object” (1976, SE, V, p.
373).
Five years later, Freud appealed to repetition in “Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious.” Jokes, he said, make their point through repetition. “Where the comic of
situation operates by means of repetitions, it is based on the child’s peculiar pleasure in
constant repetition4 (of questions or of being told stories) which make him a nuisance to
the adult” (1976, SE, V, p. 226).

Freud also introduced “recognition of what is familiar” (Wiederfinden des Be-
kannten)—perhaps a precursor to compulsion to repeat, though one working with the
pleasure principle—in the same book, when he turned to an analysis of “play” as a first
step in getting at the meaning of jokes. Play appears early in childhood, with the
acquisition of language, and serves the pleasure principle.
Play—let us keep to that name [instead of “games”]—appears in children while they are
learning to make use of words and to put thoughts together. This play probably obeys one of
the drives that compel children to practice their capacities. In doing so, they come across
pleasurable effects, which arise from a repetition of what is similar, a rediscovery of what is
familiar, similarity of sound, and so forth, and which are to be explained as unsuspected
economies in psychical expenditure. It is not to be wondered at that these pleasurable effects
encourage children in the pursuit of play and cause them to continue it without regard for the
meaning of words or the coherence of sentences. (1976, SE, VIII, p. 128)
Games, as a regulated form of play, intensify the joy of recognition, a form of

repetition, by “putting obstacles in its way”—thereby creating a damming-up that is
released through that act of recognition. The act of recognition is “pleasurable in
itself—that is, through relieving psychical expenditure.” Thus, games “make use of the
mechanism of damming up only in order to increase the amount of pleasure” (1976, SE,
VIII, pp. 121–122). The yield of pleasure on playing games, then, is proportional to the
amount of psychical release, and obstacles make sense only insofar as they increase the
psychical tension and potential for its release. The analog of games Freud had in mind is
that of foreplay prior to sexual intercourse.
For adults, with maturation and strengthening of the critical faculty, reality takes
center stage, and play, the emissary of the inner world, has a diminished explicit role in
adult life. Thus, the rediscovery of what is familiar ceases to have the bang for adults that
it has for children. Yet, despite appearances, adults cannot give up play, for no source of
pleasure is ever renounced. Adult play is, then, an effort to repeat the pleasure of
childhood by finding a suitable substitute that does not elicit the censures of either the
player or peers (1976, SE, VIII, p. 129). Adults’ play is a substitute form of repetition. One
has only to reflect on the role of playful sexuality in adults to multiply examples. Later in
the same work, Freud expands his analysis of children’s games. Their games typically
involve another form of repetition—mimicry—that is, observation and replication of
adult’s behavior. Mimicry of adults’ situations, Freud says, is a child’s “best art” and what
motivates most of his games. Mimicry of children’s situations is also a form of comic
“degradation” for adults and a source of pleasure for children. “This relief, which gives the
child pure pleasure, becomes in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making
things comic and a source of comic pleasure. As regards unmasking” (1976, SE, VIII, p.
227). Thus, children’s games are principally about mimicry of adults—a species of
libidinal preparation for adulthood—and only infrequently about striving among equals.
Adult games, the passage suggests, seldom involve mimicry, but are chiefly means of
competing among equals and are neither (overtly) comic nor degrading. Adult play is play
that gives reality due consideration.
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1976, SE, IX), 3 years later, shows that
fantasying, which is most frequently sexual, is another sort of repetition for Freud. The
seriousness of adulthood is explicable through recognition that no one succeeds in ever
giving up anything that he has come to experience as pleasurable. Apparent renunciations
of a childhood pleasures are in fact substitutions and, thus, covert repetitions. Though one
can no longer play as a child, one can fantasize on archaic preoccupations. The seriousness
of adulthood is ameliorated by indulgence in repetitive daydreaming concerning fantasies,
rooted in childhood (p. 144).
The fantasies of adulthood, as repetitive substitutes for the play of children, are not
directly observable to other adults. A child may play a game, whose “rules” are known
only to himself— or to himself and other children— but the game he plays is not played
with the intention of concealment from others. However, concealment is an indispensable
part the fantasies of an adult, who, because of shame, would rather admit his foulest
misdeeds than his fantasies to another adult (1976, SE, IX, pp. 144 –145). The suggestion
here is that the games that adults do play— or those aspects of them they find most
pleasurable— offer clues, through substitutive repetitions, to their fantasies, rooted in
childhood wishes and impulses.
The key difference between children’s play and adults’ daydreams lies in the motives
of each. Children’s play, like their dreams, is naked. It is determined by a single,
unconcealed wish—to be and act like an adult—which allows for pleasure through
libidinal release. Adults’ daydreams, revealed to Freud in psychoanalyses,5 are otherwise.
Constrained to act with due consideration for the real world, adults are prohibited from
playing in the manner of children. Instead, they resort to fantasy (1976, SE, IX, p. 146).
A paradox is manifest. Children’s play, through repeating the behaviors of adults, directly
reveals their wishes to be adults. Adults’ hidden fantasies, through repeating things found
pleasurable as children, conceal their wishes to be, once again, children.
To sum up, Freud had a use of repetition that is consistent with the pleasure principle.
We have mentioned three forms of this use of repetition in Freud’s work: (a) repetitions
occurring in substitutions, (b) repetitions occurring in mimicry, and (c) repetitions occur-
ring in fantasy.
Freud, Neurosis, and Repetition
Repetitions, prior to as well as after the structural theory of 1926 elaboration of Freud’s
identification of signal anxiety, are also critical in the clinical setting because neurosis
reveals itself in repetitions (viz., hysterical symptoms). “The fluctuation of intensity on the
part of the hysterical symptom is . . . repeated whenever we are dealing with a new
memory that is pathogenic in this respect: the symptom is, as it were, on the agenda all
the time” (1976, SE, XVI, p. 298). Thus, symptoms encrypt past experience and, as such,
are a species of repetition.
The symptoms of different sorts of neuroses express repetitions in different ways. We
illustrate with three examples. First, there are the obsessional neuroses. “All these
obsessional patients have a tendency to repeat, to make their performances rhythmical and
to keep them isolated from other actions.” That form of neurosis is also exhibited in
religious rituals. Next, there is anxiety hysteria. “Patients who suffer from agoraphobia . . .
often repeat the same features in their symptoms with wearisome monotony: they are
afraid of enclosed spaces, of large open squares, of lengthy roads and streets” (1976, SE,
XVI, p. 270). Finally and, as we shall see, most importantly for a grasp of compulsion to
repeat, there are the traumatic neuroses. “The traumatic neuroses give a clear indication
that a fixation to the moment of the traumatic accident lies at their root. These patients
regularly repeat the traumatic situation in their dreams; where hysteriform attacks occur
that admit of an analysis, we find that the attack corresponds to a complete transplanting
of the patient into the traumatic situation”—as if a patient needs to complete something
about the traumatic situation6 (1976, SE, XVI, p. 273).
Yet the idiosyncrasies of patients’ early experiences, we come to find, are not so
idiosyncratic. Freud wrote, “If the individual symptoms are so unmistakably dependent on
the patient’s experience, it remains possible that the typical symptoms may go back to an
experience which is itself typical— common to all human beings.” Other features that
recur regularly in neuroses, like the repetitions or doubts in obsessional neurosis, might be
general reactions patients have because of the nature of their pathological change (1976,
SE, XVI, pp. 271–272). Here, Freud hinted at phylogenic counterparts to ontogenetic
experiences—thereby making the ontogenetic experiences repetitions.
What are those phylogenic counterparts? In his 1905 essay “Three Essays on Sexu-
ality” (1976, SE, VII), Freud wrote,
A similar connection determines the relation between ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Onto-
genesis may be considered as a repetition of phylogenesis insofar as the latter has not been
varied by a more recent experience. The phylogenetic disposition makes itself visible behind
the ontogenetic process. But fundamentally the constitution is really the precipitate of a former
experience of the species to which the newer experience of the individual being is added as
the sum of the occasional factors. (p. xii)
Almost 25 years later, in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1976, SE, XXI), Freud
noted a role for repetition in sustaining guilt. Guilt is an ontogenetic repetition of the
phylogenic past in that it goes back to the killing of the primal father. The remorse
associated with historic murder was the result of a patient’s primal ambivalence toward
the primal father. Through hatred, a patient committed the deed; through love, he came to
experience remorse. Remorse resulted in internalizing the father’s power through estab-
lishing conscience and through restrictions against any repetition of the murder or its
psychic equivalents. “And since the inclination to aggressiveness against the father was
repeated in the following generations, the sense of guilt, too, persisted, and it was
reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that was suppressed and carried
over to the superego” (pp. 132–133).7
Finally, in a letter to Ferenczi and an unpublished metapsychological essay (Freud,
1987), Freud stated that different forms of neuroses have different phylogenic antecedents.
A letter, written on July 12 of 1915, begins as follows: “There is a series of chronological
starting points in patients which runs thus: Anxiety hysteria— conversion hysteria—
obsessional neurosis— dementia praecox—paranoia—melancholia-mania. . . . This series
seems to repeat phylogenetically an historical origin. What are now neuroses were
once phases in human conditions” (p. 79). First, privations in the prespeech glacial period
made men apprehensive and transformed libido into anxiety. Second, they realized that
there must be certain restrictions to propagation and that led to hysteria. Third, with the
development of speech and intelligence, primal hordes were formed and the primal father
forced libidinal prohibitions. Compulsion, qua obsessional neurosis, marked their struggle
to return to the former state, an impossible scenario, and the resulting neuroses were
acquired by the sons in a Lamarckian manner. Fourth, upon the threat of castration at the
hands of the primal father, the sons were forced to relinquish all sexual objects and
the result was dementia praecox. Fifth, the sons, driven out by the father, organized
themselves on a homosexual basis and their struggle with their homosexuality was
signified by paranoia. Finally, they killed the father, mourned him, and effected an
identification with him and the result was mania-melancholia.8 The sequence proffers
astonishingly to establish a phylogenetic antecedent to all transference neuroses—that is,

the transference neuroses are merely repetitions of earlier deeds and, presumably, human
tendencies toward them are grounded in “memories” of those deeds.
At Ferenczi’s bidding, the essay was never published, however tantalizing the phy-
logenic speculations might have seemed to Freud. Ferenczi convinced Freud that the series
of chronological starting points for the transference neuroses was too neat and, thus, best
left to fantasy, especially in light of its remoteness from clear-cut clinical observation.
Later, in 1926, Freud defended a novel alternative account of anxiety as a signal.
Nonetheless, believing that there were strong parallels between the development of
individuals and that of the species over time, Freud would, at some point, apply psycho-
analytic findings vis-à-vis individual pathology to groups. In that way, therapy that was
directed at enabling individuals to gain a greater sense of unity through recapturing their
own history, instead of reliving it through repetitive pathological symptoms, could be
directed at groups. Thus, the aim of group psychology can be grasped simply as giving all
human beings a greater awareness of their own species’ history to prevent them, to
paraphrase Santayana, from repeating it. Sharfenberg (1988) wrote, “If Freud . . . tried to
free the patient from precisely the vicious circle of the constant compulsion to repeat, then
that was also true for the phenomenal forms of culture: if history exhausts itself in constant
repetition, it maintains a pathological character trait. . . . The liberation of the human race
from these compulsions to repeat is, therefore, the real passion of his criticism of religion”
(p. 121).
Repetition as a key feature of neurotic behavior is not so astonishing once one realizes
that libidinal cathexes, attached to objects, are “extremely difficult if not impossible to
disengage” (Freeman, 1968, p. 1113) and that repetition is a key feature of normal sexual
behavior. As Santas (1988) noted, “In thumb-sucking ‘the need for repeating the sexual
satisfaction now becomes detached from the need to take in nourishment,’ and becomes
an independent sexual aim, with a second erotogenic zone (besides the lips) being created
by the child, a part of his own body, the reason for the activity being called ‘auto-erotic’”
(p. 105). Similarly, the actions in erotogenic zones are repetitions.
Freud’s 1933 essay “Femininity” (1976, SE, XXII) identified yet another presentation
of repetition: identification rooted in libido. “Under the influence of a woman’s becoming
a mother herself, an identification with her own mother may be revived, against which she
had striven up till the time of her marriage, and this may attract all the available libido to
itself, so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an unhappy marriage, and this may
attract all the available libido to itself, so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an
unhappy marriage between her parents” (p. 133). It is likely that Freud thought all the
ego’s defensive postures selected for repetitions in a similar manner—that is, archaic
repetitions, namely identifications and the like—achieve ego-tolerable expressions as a
consequence of the ego’s defenses, defenses that include identification.9
In addition to Freud’s use of at least three forms of repetition consistent with the
pleasure principle, we have now identified yet another usage. On this use, repetition is a
central feature of neurotic symptoms. None of these four uses involve the notion of
compulsion.
Repetition as Compulsion in Three Works
“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”

Freud’s first use of compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) occurred in 1914 in his

paper “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (1976, SE, XII), where he
posited a clinical, compulsive use of the term Wiederholung. Patients remember nothing
of what they have repressed, otherwise it is not repressed. Instead, they repetitively reenact
repressed material in and outside the analytic setting10 (pp. 149 –150).
Freud illustrated with an example. A patient behaves defiantly and critically toward his
analyst, but fails to remember that that is how he used to behave toward his parents. He
produces a mass of confused dreams and associations and complains of constant failure,
but does not remember that his infantile sexual life was helpless and hopeless. Rather, he
states that he is ashamed of his need for analytic treatment and of being now found out,
and is oblivious to his terror of having his early sexual experiences and shame over them
disclosed. When the analyst informs or reminds his patient of the first rule of psycho-
analysis—that is, free association—the patient’s associations evaporate, but his silence is
a defensive resistance to the repressed material and a sign of negative transference.11
Freud summed, “As long as the patient is in the treatment he cannot escape from this
compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering”
(1976, SE, XII, p. 150).
What, precisely, is the relationship between the compulsion to repeat and transference
and resistance? First, transference itself, Freud noted, is a “piece of repetition,” as the
repetition is not only a transference of the forgotten past on to the analyst, but also on to
other aspects of the analytic situation. “The patient yields to the compulsion to repeat,
which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his
doctor but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the
time.” Second, resistance is straightforwardly related to the compulsion to repeat. He
stated almost algorithmically, “The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting
out (i.e., repetition) replace remembering.”12 He summed, “We have learnt that the patient
repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance”13 (1976,
SE, XII, pp. 150 –151).
The scenario suggests the temporal direction for therapy: An analyst must work from
present symptoms to their secret archaic representations in the patient. It also shows the
defects of the earlier cathartic treatment, which did not focus on childhood. In cases of
neurosis— going back to repressed, early childhood experiences—an analyst is guided
more by repeating than remembering. Freud cited as an extreme case an elderly woman
in the habit of fleeing her husband and house at twilight to go nowhere in particular. The
woman fled from therapy after only a week. The first step of an analyst, then, is to interpret
and to mobilize the patient’s will and to begin the lengthy process of working through
repetitions toward remembering (1976, SE, XII, p. 154).
In classical psychoanalytic theory, this working through requires the patient’s neurosis
to mutate into a transference neurosis during the analysis proper.14 “We render the
compulsion harmless, and indeed useful,” Freud said, “by giving it the right to assert itself
in a definite field.” We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed

to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us
everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind. In such
a manner, an analyst seeks to interpret the patient’s symptoms in relation to their
transference meaning—an “intermediate region between illness and real life”—and ordi-
nary neurosis during the analytic hour as transference neurosis, which is an artificial
illness that is accessible to psychoanalytic intervention. Here, the “repetitive reactions” in
the transference neurosis, their interpretation, and their working through lead down old
paths, permitting the patient’s rediscovery of unconscious memories (1976, SE, XII, pp.
154 –155).
“The Uncanny”
Much of what Freud had to say in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1976, SE, XVIII) is
anticipated in a short essay titled “The Uncanny” (das Unheimliche; 1976, SE, XVII).
Here, what is significant is that the link between repetition and libido, which seemed
unbreakable in earlier works, is broken. The “uncanny is that class of the frightening,”
Freud asserted, “which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (pp.
219 –220).
Freud began with “The Sand Man” (1976, SE, XVII), a tale by E.T.A. Hoffman. The
tale begins with Nathaniel, thinking back to his youth, when he would hear a story at night
about the coming of the Sand Man, a dreadful person who would throw sand into the eyes
of boys and girls who would not go to bed. Heads bleeding from the sand, the children
would then be thrown into sacks and carried to the Half-Moon as food for his children.
The children of the Half-Moon, with hooked beaks, would then sit in their nest and peck
at the eyes of the naughty children. Psychoanalytic experience of patients, Freud added,
shows that the fear of losing one’s eyes is derived from the fear of castration. Such a
connection is needed to tie together elements of the story that otherwise would appear
meaningless (pp. 230 –232).
A peculiarity of the story is the repetition of features, character-traits, crimes, and
names over generations. That doubling, argued by Rank to be an insurance against death,
takes on new meaning for Freud. There is also a doubling of the ego—the development
of a critical agency that sets itself apart from and presides over the ego (i.e., the ego-ideal,
or superego later) and is at least partly responsible for the factor of repetition (1976, SE,
XVII, pp. 234 –236).
Another peculiarity of the story is the involuntary repetition of something inescapable
or fateful. With the thesis of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” clearly in mind,15 he wrote,
It is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a “compulsion to repeat”

proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the
instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain
aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses
of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the
analyses of neurotic patients. (1976, SE, XVII, p. 238)
Here, it is the compulsion to repeat unpleasant experiences—an involuntary repetition and

confirmation of destructive impulses—which is perceived to be uncanny. Freud wrote,
“Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead
bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (1976, SE, XVII, p. 241).
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

One year after “The Uncanny,” Freud attempted at least a provisional modification of his
theory of drives with “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”—a work saturated with metapsy-
chological content and written in ragtag manner.16 Here, the compulsion to repeat is linked
with his introduction of the death drive.
Freud began with a discussion of the economics of the pleasure principle and then
turned, in section two, to an analysis of the dreams of those suffering from traumatic
neuroses. “Dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly
bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he
wakes up in another fright.” That shows a fixation to the trauma.17 He was left to conclude
either that such dreams are not fulfillments of wishes or that the ego is masochistic (1976,
SE, XVIII, pp. 13–14).
Freud next turned to observations of repetitive behavior of his own grandson, Ernst
Halberstadt, at 1.5 years of age. The child, fond of throwing away toys and hunting after
them, stumbled upon a new game, which he constantly repeated. One day, he tossed a
wooden reel with attached string behind a curtained cot, where it disappeared from view,
though the string did not. He then made the reel reappear by pulling the string. With its
reemergence, he exclaimed, da (“there”) and repeated the activity tirelessly, with the same
verbal da each time. Freud interpreted the repetitive behavior of the boy thus: tossing the
stick ⫽ reliving of the pain he felt when his mother would leave him; his retrieving the
stick by pulling the string ⫽ his joy upon her return. The behavior enabled the boy to
master an otherwise passive situation or fed a desire for revenge upon the mother for
leaving (1976, SE, XVIII, p. 16). Is the game, Freud asked, was this an indicator of another
independent, primitive principle, with its own energy, something beyond the pleasure
principle?
No, Freud replied. The yield of repetition here is a different sort of pleasure, aimed
at mastery of the unpleasant situation. The yield accords not only with a child’s wish
to be grown up, but also with the perverse pleasure adults take in staged tragedy.
There is no reason to go beyond the pleasure principle to explain it (1976, SE, XVIII,
pp. 16 –17). These are all themes canvassed earlier in this paper.
Freud then cited other, more troublesome repetitions. First, there are compulsions to repeat
that cannot be subsumed under the pleasure principle. They appear as resistance in psycho-
analytic treatment, whereby unpleasant experiences are relived and experienced as tolerable.
Removing defense provided by these repetitions leads not to pleasure (lust), but displeasure
(unlust). In therapy, many patients compulsively recall past calamities, like infantile loss of
love, that never have had and never will have a chance of resulting in pleasure. That
notwithstanding, such experiences are repeated via behavioral proxies during therapy. Second,
there are repetitive behaviors available to the most casual observers. Freud considered the
benefactor once again abandoned by ungrateful benefactors, the amicable man who is
continually betrayed by “friends,” the authoritarian who constantly places into a prominent
position of authority a person who is only to be replaced by another such person, and the lover
who is doomed to repeat the same sorry stages in each new relationship. Third, and worse, are
instances of passive, seemingly fated experiences of repetition. There is the woman who
married three husbands, each of whom fell ill shortly thereafter and had to be nursed by her
on his deathbed. There are the traumatic dreams of soldiers, who suffer from war neuroses and
experience continued anxiety through disturbing dreams that bind psychical energy to the
trauma. “Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat—
something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure
principle which it overrides” (1976, SE, XVIII, pp. 18 –23, 32–36). Such cases imply
something independent of the pleasure principle.
What is the relationship of the compulsion to repeat to this something independent of
the pleasure principle that Freud christened the death drive? Freud took himself to have
discovered a “universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general.” He
added that a drive is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things
which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external
disturbing forces.” A drive, thus, is an expression of organic inertia.18 Consequently,
Freud asserted, “the aim of life is death”—though not any death, but the particular kind
of death suited to the type of organism.19 A fitting death is the telos of life. The obstacles
of external reality must be averted for the organism to attain the right sort of death (1976,
SE, XVIII, pp. 36 –39). In such a manner, the death drive does in some sense function to
preserve life so that a human organism can attain a humanly fitting death, not just any sort
of death. The death drive, in contrast, fights off the obstacles of external reality that might
bring it to peril prematurely.20 What we have, at day’s end, is Freud’s linking the
compulsion to repeat to “a manifestation of the power of the repressed,” which seems to
Freud to be derived from an antecedent “more primitive, more elementary, more instinc-
tual than the pleasure principle which it overrides” (p. 39).
In the use of repetition surveyed in this section, the link of repletion and compulsion
emerges. This link emerges in the clinical context in relation to repetition of symptomatic
behavior by patients. The notion of a compulsion arises, as well as the now familiar
psychiatric position that compulsions are not pleasurable. This linkage of repetition and
compulsion does at least seem to challenge Freud’s idea that the pleasure principle is a law
of human conduct, and why compulsive repetitions spurred Freud to hypothesis the dual
drive theory that challenges the hypothesis that there are no exceptions to the pleasure
principle in human conduct.
Freud’s Compulsion to Justify the Death Drive
The provisional status of the death drive in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) is
given full-fledged patronage 3 years later in “The Ego and the Id”21 (1913; Freud, 1976,
SE, XIX, pp. 12– 68), where Freud had two sustained discussions of it, minus any
reference to his conjecture of a daemonic compulsion to repeat. The patronage is difficult
to grasp, given numerous problems with both concepts. We focus on these two discussions
only to the extent that they are related directly to the compulsion to repeat.
We begin with what is not so much a problem, but a curious omission—the lack of any
reference to the compulsion or repeat in “The Ego and the Id” (Freud, 1976, SE, XVIIII,
pp. 1– 64). In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the compulsion to repeat is what persuaded
Freud of the existence of the death drive. Whatever merit the postulation of a death drive
has in 1920 it has that merit mostly because of its link to the compulsion to repeat in
relation to the pleasure principle. Sometimes, it appears, a repetition compulsion instan-
tiates repeated behaviors inconsistent with what had been the primacy of the pleasure
principle. And, thus, the compulsion to repeat, as it were, takes center stage. Why did
Freud not mention the compulsion to repeat in 1923, when he formally endorsed the death
drive? One might argue that Freud’s aims while writing “The Ego and the Id” were
different. In 1923, he was focusing on the nature of the psychical agencies of his emerging
structural model, and how to accommodate the structural model to his emerging theory of
dual drives, and how both are related to psychopathological phenomena such as perse-
cution paranoia and homosexuality, not a justification of the death drive, per se. In 1920,
he was struggling to better understand clinical phenomena that struck him as incompatible
with his standing account of the pleasure principle. As mentioned, certain types of
repetition compulsions seemed to Freud incompatible with his standing account of the
pleasure principle and to require an inference to a better explanation that Freud believed
involved explicit recognition of a death drive. That notwithstanding, it is still odd that
there is no mention of the compulsion to repeat in 1923.
Second, Freud gave many examples of behaviors illustrative of the compulsion to
repeat, even if not so tagged, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”— children’s play,
resistance in therapy, casual observations of human behavior, “fated” repetitions, and

dreams of patients with traumatic neuroses—including some claimed to necessitate the
hypothesis of the death drive.22 What distinguishes examples that are justificatory of the
death drive (e.g., resistance in therapy, casual observations, fated repetition, and dreams
of patients with traumatic neurosis) from examples that are not (e.g., children’s play)?
Freud’s answer was that compulsively repetitive behaviors characteristic of the death
drive are a daemonic dimension of human behavior that is not consistent with the pleasure
principle. Therefore, an inference to a better explanation requires that some other driving
force than the pleasure principle exist. If so, then nothing further needs to be said on behalf
of the death drive: Daemonic instances of the compulsion to repeat leave no space for
doubt about the existence of a death drive in cases where the pleasure principle fails to
save the clinical phenomena, even though inference to a best explanation does not explain
that explanation’s connotation and its theoretical role within a larger theory.
In “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (Freud, 1976, SE, XXII, pp. 81–111), as if to allay
any lingering doubts he harbors on the death drive, Freud expanded on the list of behaviors
manifesting the compulsion to repeat that he gave in 1920. He noted that embryology, the
capacity to regenerate lost organs, the ability to recover from illness, the spawning of
fishes, the migratory flights of birds, and perhaps even everything called “instinct” (here,
Instinkt) in animals are manifestations of “the conservative nature of the instincts” (here,
Triebe). There are problems with this list. To begin, it might be that all such illustrations
are conservative, but it is difficult to see how all such illustrations are daemonic. Second,
in what way might all instincts be compulsive repetitions—for example, the communica-
tion, via dance of food by honeybees, the instinct of flight or fight, or imprinting in geese,
for these would ordinarily be thought of as examples of Instinkt rather than Triebe? Worse
still, none of Freud’s examples solve psychological riddles that are at the center of his
work. If the earlier survey of Freud’s use of repetition shows anything, it is that a core
meaning involves a disguised, in some sense psychically satisfying, representation in
adulthood of archaic wishes and impulses, often centering on sexuality, that are now
banned from adult consciousness. When Freud added the idea of compulsion to repetition,
he also came to believe that some repetitions (compulsive ones) are at odds with the
pleasure principle. A derivative of this idea remains to this day in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders requirement that compulsions are not compul-
sions if the behavior involved in them is pleasurable, a reason to reject, for example, a
diagnostic category like “sexual compulsion,” and the actual reason heavy drinking and
gambling are conceived as addictions rather than as compulsions. They are too fun to be
compulsions. Or so the orthodox thinking on the topic goes.
In the human realm, elements in dreams, reactions in analysis, common repetitive
behaviors outside of analysis, and even fated repetitions are manifestations of the com-
pulsion to repeat and human self-destructiveness (1976, SE, XXII, pp. 106 –107). Con-
spicuously absent is children’s play,23 unquestionably stated as an instance of the com-
pulsion to repeat 12 years earlier (1976, SE, XVIII, p. 23). Freud never defended why
these observed repetitions, especially those instances of nonhuman repetitions, essentially
involve a violation of the pleasure principle. Perhaps, he thought it was plain. For
example, a doctor can elicit an instinctive reflex, for example a patellar reflex occurs
independently of any pleasure or displeasure. Likewise, a herd instinctively will follow the
Judas sheep, even to their doom. Nevertheless it is unproven that the cited repetitions are
incompatible with the pleasure principle, though one possibility is that paradigmatic
child’s play is not regressive while the other examples are. In addition and consistent with
the introduction of the compulsion to repeat is the idea that play does not require a clinical
“working through.” It is not an example from psychoanalytic psychopathology, perhaps

because it is a repetition of the kind mentioned in early sections, but not a repetition
compulsion. Clinically this is harder to accept without qualification. Much juvenile play
is innocent, but large portions of it are not—for example, decapitated dolls.
There is also a difficulty regarding the compulsion to repeat noted by Cordelia
Schmidt-Hellerau (1997). Why should the compulsion to repeat, she asks, “be ascribable
only to the unconscious repressed” (p. 691)? The ego also manifests the compulsion to
repeat. In fact, any number of phenomena can be examples of a compulsion to repeat,
(viz., a reaction formation may often count as an example of a compulsion to repeat). The
compulsion to repeat, as a manifestation of the death drive, is a functional property of the
human psychical apparatus as a whole, not just the unconscious repressed. As Freud came
to understand, nobody can “locate” the unconscious functions and material in the way that
he did in Die Traumdeutung (Freud, 1976, SE, IV–V, pp. 1– 628). In particular, in the
present context, Freud recognized defense as an ego function that is (typically) uncon-
scious.
Consequences of the First Objections to the Death Drive

The implications of that recognition are profound. Freud was forced to redefine Trieb in
keeping with the conservative nature of the death drive—that is, now an urge of the organic
to return what is prior to the organic, and no longer “a factor impelling toward change and
development.” The new definition is finalistic or telic—“an intelligent magnitude that knows
what it wants and remembers what has been.” Thus, drive is now structural— characteristic of
the system as a whole—not merely a particular variable of it. Therefore, one can no longer
speak of Eros and the death drive as equal and antagonistic. The death drive is tout court
primary; drive dualism loses its meaning (Schmidt-Hellerau, 1997, p. 691), or is at least far
removed from Freud’s elaboration of it through the 1920s and 1930s.
There is one more point worth mentioning. The manner in which the compulsion to repeat
is alleged to be a signifier of the death drive is suspicious. Freud noted, in the case of the
dreams of persons suffering with traumatic neuroses, that the repetitions place them back into
the situation that caused their neurosis. He wrote, “We may assume, rather, that dreams are
here helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of
the pleasure principle can even begin. Their dreams are endeavoring to master the stimulus
retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic
neurosis.” Such dreams are retrospective attempts to master the traumatic situation by bringing
forth the anxiety that is claimed to accompany traumatic events. So, they aim to bring persons
to a state where they can once again experience pleasure. “They thus afford us a view of a
function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not contradict the pleasure principle, is
nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining
pleasure and avoiding pain” (1976, SE, XVIII, pp. 31–32). Two things are worth noting in this
connection. First, Freud stated baldly that some repetitive, traumatic dreams are not inconsis-
tent with the pleasure principle. Second, some repetitive behavior, which is an attempt to
master a traumatic situation, can be viewed as a defense to master traumatic situations and,
thus, behavior that is not independent of the pleasure principle. Why, then, did Freud insist that
traumatic dreams offer evidence of a death drive? Here, Freud could fall back on one of many
ad hoc moves, because descriptions of the compulsion to repeat and the death drive have been
imprecise, polysemic, and slippery all along. We have just given one instance in the paragraph
above. We offer two more.
First, Freud (1976, SE, XVIII) said, “It is to be noted that only in rare instances can we
observe the compulsion to repeat, unsupported by other motives”—that is, than that of the
death drive. Some children’s play exhibits the compulsion to repeat, but one that is in keeping
with the pleasure principle and one that is detached from working through (p. 23).
Second, when examining the precise relationship of the compulsion to repeat to the
pleasure principle, Freud (1976, SE, XVIII) stated, “the greater part of what is reexperi-
enced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to
light activities of repressed instinctual impulses.” Yet such unlust does not contradict the
pleasure principle, as it is “unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for
the other” (p. 23). Again, he did not amplify.
Consequences for the Pleasure Principle

What is governed by the pleasure principle? Is it the self? Is it the ego, the id, or the superego?
It is prima facie implausible to claim that the id or the superego is governed by the pleasure
principle, as the ego is seeking to resolve id and superego conflict with a solution that is
consistent with the pleasure principle. Perhaps the best answer is that the psychical apparatus
is governed by it, but defending this view would take us far afield from the present topic of
repetition.
Did Freud, then, have in mind certain thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure? What he said
immediately hereafter—that there are other past experiences which “include no possibility of
pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual
impulses which have since been repressed”—suggests that thresholds are not in fact the issue
(1976, SE, XVIII, p. 20). Repetitions of such “unpleasant” experiences seem to allow for no
possibility of pleasure whatsoever for any system. The claim is hard to make credible.
Traumatic dreams, for example, through triggering anxiety, call forth defensive efforts to
achieve mastery over the anxiety by repressing unconscious material at risk of emergence into
consciousness in a way consistent with the pleasure principle. Here, traumatic dreams seem to
differ nowise, except quantitatively, from the sort of game played by Freud’s grandson Ernst,
who deliberately engaged himself in an anxiety-laden form of play to master the distressing
situation of the disappearance of his beloved mother. They can be linked to a need to be
worked through in analysis to achieve consciousness of the unconscious material that triggers
the anxiety during these dreams. There are numerous other difficulties, which we shall not
cover, for they relate more specifically to the death drive, while our focus is repetitions.24
Back to Repetition
Overall, it is obvious that Freud blurred different senses of Wiederholungszwang. He

failed to distinguish between compulsive behavior and compulsive repetitive behavior. As
Dobson and Katchan (1992) wrote, “The constant repetition of a behavior—irrespective
of whether it is stimulated by the experiencing representative of a traumatic event— does
not imply the existence of a ‘compulsion to repeat,’ as distinguished from the ‘compulsion
which leads to the behavior itself’” (pp. 62– 63). In short, what gives certain Wiederhol-
ungen their Zwang? Freud, unfortunately, never tackled the issue of the ambiguity of
Wiederholungszwang—an issue that most certainly has a bearing on normal mental
development as opposed to pathological human behaviors.
Why is that the case? The reason, we believe, was that Freud’s preoccupation with
the death drive was metapsychological and too remote from clinical work. He had
become so bewitched by the death drive by 1920, perhaps owing to his personal
disillusionment with the first World War, or thereabout, that he was willing to
incorporate it into his metapsychology— despite throwing his metapsychology into a

state of chaos and of ignoring a potentially fecund area of empirical research for
psychoanalysis.25 So much in the grip the death drive was Freud that he overlooked
(a) the ability of his pre-1920 psychology to accommodate all instances of compulsion
to repetition with his old theory of drives and (b) that his old theory did not entail the
numerous complications of his new theory (Schur, 1972). As Otto Fenichel’s (1995)
classical exposition contends, it seems that by the time of the structural theory,
Freud’s reliance on repetition compulsion lost its rationale (pp. 58 – 61, 129 –131).
Why, then, did Freud persist?
A psychoanalytic answer, endorsed by several,26 is that Freud was driven by internal,
unconscious motives of an unpleasant, repetitive nature, with which he himself could not
come to terms. In short, his personal psychology made the supremacy of the pleasure
principle impossible for him to believe. There were also external factors, not the least of
which were the Great War and the repetitive behaviors exhibited by soldiers,27 as well as
the daemonic, repetitive behaviors of patients in his clinical practice.28 Furthermore, there
was his inflexible commitment to etiological dualism apropos of drives. Human behavior,
he consistently believed, was too complex not to be the result of conflicting drives. As
Holt (1989) wrote, “It was as if [Freud’s] conviction about the central importance of
conflict forced him always to postulate an opposed duality of basic drives, even if it
became necessary to lump together disparate motives with anatomically and physiologi-
cally quite separate bases” (p. 179).29
Another answer, which has to be given some consideration, is driven by philosophy-
of-science concerns—that is, the scientific adequacy of his new theory of drives. In
numerous instances, especially when defending himself from critics that question the
scientific status of psychoanalysis (e.g., 1976, SE, XX, pp. 57–58, 254 –257). Consider-
ations of simplicity may have convinced Freud that his new theory of drives was simpler,
more fruitful, fit better with the other sciences of his time and the observable facts, and had
greater scope than did the old theory of drives.
Freud, in fact, never undertook a detailed examination of the scientific adequacy of his
new theory of drives, which suggests, though does not necessarily commit him to, an
unreflective commitment to drive dualism. He came close to an examination of the right
kind of examination in “The Ego and the Id,” where he gave two sustained accounts of the
death drive (1976, SE, XIX, pp. 40 –77, 53–56). In the midst of the first account, section
four of the work, he qualified his explanation, “In the present discussion . . . I am only
putting forward a hypothesis; I have no proof to offer.” Thus, the lengthy metapsycho-
logical description he gave in section four of how the death drive and Eros function, he
gave ex hypothesi. Freud offered no decisive evidence that the new theory of drives fits
the facts better. And his “hypothesis,” without clear cut examples of predictive conse-
quences, is anything but scientific. He seemed instead to be thinking things through on
paper—i.e., showing himself more than his readers that the death drive is not incoherent.
In Autobiographical Study (1976, SE, XX), however, Freud did address the issue of
conceptual fogginess of the death drive. He said, “It remains to be seen whether this
construction [i.e., the death drive] will turn out serviceable. Although it arose from a
desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psycho-analysis, it goes far
beyond psycho-analysis.” He then addressed the criticism of the imprecision of “libido”
and “drive” and defends his young science with the argument, often used by him, that no
empirical science can begin with precise concepts, for precision comes only with the
“progressive analysis of the material of observation.” He added, vis-à-vis his metapsy-
chological concepts, “I do not know how far I believe in them” (p. 57).
Defects of the first theory of drives notwithstanding, a full examination of the criteria
of scientific adequacy, had he expressly undertaken it, may have shown Freud that his new
theory of drives was not simpler than the first, that it was anything but fruitful, and that
it was not conservative in the least. Of course, these normative terms of the philosophy of
science are themselves uncashed metaphors whose criteria of application are murky.
The only clear advantage in Freud’s new theory of drives is that it seems to have
greater scope in the sense that the death drive is said to be operative in all living things,
and seems to fit with his attempt to “biologize” the mind in his unpublished “Project”
(Freud, 1976, SE, I, pp. 283– 414). A possible advantage is that the new theory has the
advantage of taking the clinical facts at face value. Without special pleading, there do
seem to be plenty of instances where it is hard to believe a patient’s behavior is consistent
with the pleasure principle.
These three sections have made several points. When Freud linked repetition and
compulsion, his antecedent theory of mind that viewed the pleasure principle as a principle
without exceptions came under pressure. Rightly or wrongly, Freud announced a dual
theory of drives that he felt better fit the facts than his prior theory that held the pleasure
principle had no exceptions. As have other commentators, we have canvassed reasons for
the changes that the linking repetition and compulsion evoked in Freud’s work. The
upshot of this discussion is that the dual drive theory, and most especially the view that
there is a death drive, has inadequate justification.
A Nondaemonic “Compulsion to Repeat”

Nonetheless, some researchers do aim to vindicate Freud by showing, often with some
tweaks, the merits of the compulsion to repeat as it relates to his death drive. They think
it is useful to have a way of conceptualizing another force that is marked in the life of
some patients— especially for example, analysands with high levels of psychopathology.
These patients do make psychic retreats to profoundly empty levels of consciousness. To
be with them can be experienced in an analyst’s countertransference as a personally
annihilating, emptying experience that makes work with these persons an extreme tech-
nical and personal challenge. Yet, it is work that also requires some comprehension of the
allure of death and of nothingness, especially when integrated solutions to an archaic
problem seem beyond reach. Acknowledging the heuristic merit of such an approach, such
research, we maintain, is only loosely empirical in that it adduces arguments in favor of
the daemonic sense of repetitive phenomena and the death drive, while it ignores and fails
to address the numerous cogent criticisms of both.30
Other researchers aim not at vindication, but at conceptual refinement or redefinition.
They seek to refine or redefine the compulsion to repeat and the death drive in a manner
that deflects, often through pretermission, the criticisms that have been heaped against it.31
A more sympathetic reading of this approach is to view it as aiming to short-circuit
theoretical objections to what they are doing by providing bona fide specimens that are
“impossible’ if their critics are right. Galileo, for example, refuted theoretical objections
to his telescope by using it and making “impossible” observations, observations that,
despite what the critics claimed, could be verified by anybody willing to take the trouble
to make them. One gets a sense of what Galileo was up against by reading Galileo’s The
Starry Messenger, The Assayer, or Betrolt Brecht’s Galileo.
The most promising line of research, we maintain, is that of freeing completely
repetition and compulsion to repeat from any mysterious connection to “an urge inherent
in organic life to restore an earlier [quiescent] state of things though this characterization
verges on a restatement of Freud’s principle of constancy, a principle that Freud described

in 1892 and that appeared in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (the death instinct would
actually follow if one accepts the principle of constancy and the view that the energy level
to which an organism seeks to return is zero). In any event, repetition and compulsion to
repeat, as they relate to human pathology, are worth analysis in their own right, as those
phenomena, at least, have some empirical foundation in Freud’s groundbreaking work on
psychopathology.
Fortunately, many researchers in various disciplines over the years are doing just that.
They are seeking greater conceptual clarification of repetition and compulsion to repeat
through more refined observations of the sorts of repetitions, pathological and otherwise,
humans exhibit. Space prohibits mention of more than a few of the numerous contributors,
following in Freud’s footsteps, who are making sizable contributions in research on
memory and psychopathology.
Memory and Nonpathology

The notion of repetition is fundamental to mental development and proper functioning was
apparent to one of the pioneers on human cognitive development—Jean Piaget. For
Piaget, mental structures, essentially dynamic, function according to operational rules and
the system as a whole seeks equilibrium. Children begin with reflex behaviors—for
example, thumb sucking—whose basic property is repetition. Through repetition, the
sucking reflex is reproductively assimilated to other objects—from sucking his fingers, a
child sucks others’ fingers within grasp, his pillow, his quilt, and his bedclothes. Piaget
(1952) summed, “Consequently he assimilates these objects to the activity of the reflex.”
Overall, repetition enables children to incorporate other objects into their “schemata” and
eventually differentiate among them—thereby refining the schemata (p. 34).
Psychoanalyst Joseph Lichtenberg (1983), based on his own research on repetitions in
infant development, offered an alternative to Freud’s high-tension state experiences. For
Freud, state experiences, whether the result of somato-erotic zonal excitement or trauma-
driven, are comparable to the disruptive effect of a rock, thrown into a placid pond.
Lichtenberg, in contrast, recognized “low- and moderate-tension state experiences,” in
which redundancies—“repetitious action patternings of infant and caretaker”— occur.
Here the rock-pond analogy falters, as the pond, symbolizing the infant in a milieu (e.g.,
exchanges between an infant and his mother), is recognized to be not in the least placid.
An infant in a milieu makes up “an extremely complex ecological system with continuous
change occurring in multiple subsystems (chemical, biological, diurnal, and evolution-
ary).” For instance, an infant’s response of cooing, clucking, and smiling on seeing his
mother can only be grasped against the “background of a structured interaction, built out
of repetition and expectancy” (pp. 153, 159). Later, Lichtenberg compared the repetitions
in exchanges between analyst and patient with those repetitions between mother and child.
In therapy, the analyst–analysand exchange builds “background expectations” for thera-

peutic progress. Here, the basic patterns of repetitions and expectancies are not altered to
mold behavior, but analyzed so that their meaning becomes clear. In mothering, the
mother–infant exchange is altered by the mother to promote growth and independence (p.
209). The influence of Freud in both instances is readily recognizable.
Modell (1996), attending on the work of Edelman on memory, states that memory is
dynamic, not static. He referred back to a letter by Freud to Fleiss, where Freud spoke of
Nachträglichkeit or deferred action as involving memory as a retranscription. Memory,
Freud noted, is something that is continually reshaped to meet present action. Modell
stated, “The compulsion to repeat represents a compulsion to seek a perceptual identity

between present and past objects” (p. 63). Thus, it offers clues to a solution to the paradox
of how repetition can give rise to new experiences. Freud’s transference neurosis may be
linked with the notion of memory as perceptual recategorization. Transference, as it
involves repetition of painful experiences, may be a research for perceptual categories that
transcends the pleasure principle.
Daniel Juda (1983) said, “When new information is admitted into consciousness— be
it externally, through unrepressible trauma, or internally, through unrepressible dreams,
symptom formation, fantasies, thoughts, and so forth—the human organism cannot rest
until this new data is assimilated and accommodated. . . . This is the motive behind our
repetition compulsions, failure to find new accommodations . . . leads to severe mental
dis-organization, dis-integration, and/or de-differentiation, with its parallel clinical man-
ifestations.” Only rarely is it maladaptive, as when it inhibits the unfolding of the
organizing process. It is thus the “sine qua non of adaptation, of development, of the
maturational process, and, if anything, a stubborn persistence in man to attempt to
assimilate and accommodate reality” (pp. 359 –362).
Hans-Jürgen Wirth (2003) said that the compulsion to repeat characterizes the creative
person who sees the imperfection of his work and is doomed to rework it ad nauseum. It
may also characterize, in a positive sense, the possibility of new experiences. “Every
repetition contains the possibility of new perspectives opening up through minute varia-
tions of the repeated fundamental conflict. Every repetition presents the attempt of
revision and the further development of the original pattern of conflict. . . . From this
perspective, repetition is a creative act that allows something unfinished to be seen again
in a creative light” (pp. 594 –595).
Pathological Senses
Fred Busch (1989) argued that the compulsion to repeat expresses itself as a comprehen-
sible recurrent defense during the course of an analysis. To understand its defensive aim,
the analyst and analysand must conceive of the analysand’s relevant repetitive behavior
that is often disguised as “action-thought.” Action-thoughts are polysemous remnant of
earlier compromise formations. To analyze repetitions, the analyst must keep in mind that
a repetition is not an undisguised action from early childhood. Instead, it is a “complex
series of reactions expressed in a type of thinking prevalent at the time the conflict first
appeared.” Thus, the analyst and analysand must absorb two lessons to make sense of the
analysand’s compulsion to repeat. First, the analysand’s compulsion to repeat expresses an
archaic solution to a riddle from the analysand’s childhood. The compulsion to repeat
expresses the child’s early nonlinguistic solution to a behavioral challenge during his
childhood. Second, a repetition manages to establish itself as a preeminent solution to the
child’s challenge because of the lengthy time a child has to rely on nonlinguistic solutions
to life’s riddles. Third, the solution is disguised from the analysand because it is an
archaic, prelinguistic solution that, in the context of adulthood, is neurotic because an
adult has the resources to achieve a better solution and to make the whole process
conscious through words. Finally, if repetitions are unanalyzed, their defensive purpose
remains hidden because the old conflict they “solve” is only partially solved. In short, a
compulsion to repeat is a partial, prelinguistic solution to a childhood conflict. Because the
conflict is only partially resolved, it continues to find expression in an analysand’s daily
life, albeit now in the form of an “action-thought.” This defensive solution is tenacious
and invisible because of being overlearned—the analysand has relied on it in one disguise
or another for many years—and does temporarily reduce signal anxiety when employed.
The price of a partial solution is that the unconscious material against which the repetition
defends remains unconscious to the analysand and the conflict never yields to a complete
solution (pp. 540 –543).
Juda (1983) acknowledged that the compulsion to repeat is something daemonic for
Freud, but it is given a Piagetian flare. “[Repetition compulsion] represents the patient’s
most successful attempt to accommodate very painful emotional experiences; it cannot be
exorcised, replace, or even challenged until newer accommodations are discovered and
trusted to master the originally disturbing data” (pp. 374 –375). Thus, Juda in effect gave
substance to Freud’s clinical insights in 1914 by universalizing the compulsion to repeat.
Shapiro (1985) took repetitions as behaviors that express a need to reunite with
parental figures— especially in times of stress. “The anxiety generated by actions or
feelings hat symbolically indicate movement away from the parents is particularly likely
to stimulate repetitions that rekindle the early parent– child relationship” (p. 302). “This
need is rooted in disturbances in the separation-individuation process” (p. 307). By
focusing on such repetitions in therapy, an analyst gains clues to the conflicted nature of
early parental attachments.
Wilson and Malatesta (1989) proposed that there are two types of repetition, primal
and symbolic, and that the compulsion to repeat is a “motivational explanation” for the
former only. Primal repetition originates early in human development and contains the
actual dyadic interaction between caregiver and child. It is less influenced by time and
occurs during preverbal and presymbolic development. Thus, its causes are beyond the
reach of “verbal and memorial access” and analysts must be in the position to interpret
repetitions without verbal and symbolic cues (pp. 266 –272).
Kirman (1996) saw the compulsion to repeat as the manifestation of early, preverbal
affective experiences—an individual’s real personality—in a negative way in the clinical
setting. “[The compulsion to repeat] is the need to recreate a situation because it affirms
and validates the feelings generated every early in our lives, feelings which we carry
deeply within us and which have come to define us to ourselves. The feeling or rather the
complex of feelings is there prior to the repetition, before the activating event, is always
there potentially, ready to be kindled as soon as it finds the right combination of external
situations to justify its arousal.” It is neither an attempt at mastery of an overwhelming
situation nor a mere daemonic manifestation of the death instinct. It is, in effect, merely
“an attempt to reaffirm one’s psychic existence, one’s self at a core level” (pp. 46 – 47).
Russell (2006) stated, “The repetition compulsion would seem to be two things. One
is the nucleus of an organized system of affective in competence, a dysfunctional feeling
system. It is also an attempt to continue an interrupted relationship in the service of the
emotional growth that was earlier broken off. It is the scar tissue of the injury to the
capacity to feel.” As such, it is an attachment to the past that destroys the present and
the person. In therapy, there is genuine risk. An analyst attempts to make the analytic
situation “enough like the past to virtually insure [sic] a repetition of an emotionally
crippling loss.” There is also the possibility of a “negotiation for feeling an attachment in
the service of growth” (p. 52).
Ørner and Stolz (2002, pp. 465– 472) addressed the assumed homogeneity of repetitive
phenomena in psychotherapy and psychotraumatology and essay to develop a viable
empirical approach that synthesizes the speculations of psychoanalysis with the latest
empirical research in biology.
What these researchers show is that is that, while the notion of a death drive may have
been infertile, the notions of repetition and compulsion to repeat have led to much fruitful
research at the empirical and conceptual levels by psychoanalysts, biologists, cognitive

psychologists, and even philosophers. While there is a pronounced tendency in the
literature to denigrate Freud either for supplantation of his old theory of drives with his
new one or for introduction of drive theory in the first place, there has been little praise
for Freud’s recognition that repetitions are invaluable assets in clinical therapy and
research into human development— especially mnemonic research. If it does little else,
this paper is, in some measure, an attempt to remedy that defect.
Concluding Thoughts
The criticisms that the concepts repetition (Wiederholung) and compulsion to repeat (Wieder-
holungszwang) are vague and underdeveloped because of Freud’s preoccupation with the
death drive hit the mark, but are they fair? We suspect that they are not. With his seminal
groundwork in psychoanalysis and the human mind, Freud opened up an extraordinary
number of lines of profitable research for experts in a number of fields, related to human
mental functioning and its impairment. It is one thing to note errors on the paths he delineated
conceptually for psychoanalysis; it is quite another to carp that he should have unerringly
delineated, through precise conceptual clarification, each of the paths. That is too much to ask.
One can understandably complain, however, the death drive, circa 2014, is a seldom visited
cul-de-sac. Whatever the ultimate status of Freud’s final dual drive theory, until it is reworked
at length, it has ceased to have a central role in modern psychoanalytic theory, despite efforts
to resuscitate it in France. We can say, though, that Freud’s ideas on repetition and compulsion
to repeat, as they developed over the years, have paved a path for much fruitful research on
human memory and psychical dysfunction.
The role of repetition and compulsion to repeat also appears to have lost vitality as a
consequence of Freud’s elaboration of the structural theory. As Rycroft (1973) once observed,
with the development of the structural theory, the compulsion to repeat becomes, when
conjoined to the thought that analysands must “work through” their insights, a mark of the
regrettable human tendency to be stuck in one’s old ways. The seemingly fresh description
begins to resemble the old notion of a habit of mind or behavior. And the structural theory also
de-emphasized the recovery of archaic data. Instead, analysis focused on defense. Unconscious
wishes and impulses, though important, were more and more left for the analyzed patient to
report. This is very clear in the close-process school of Paul Gray (Paniagua, 2011). There
remains an interest in repetition, but the emphasis is on repletion within the hour in response
to particular kinds of situations within the hour, and helping patients to notice these repetitions.
Times and fashions change. Nevertheless, the compulsion to repeat is a central
leitmotif in Freud’s thought and in psychoanalysis. To reflect on it is to note crucial,
suggestive analytic themes: the importance of the past, the repetition of the past in various
guises in psychoanalytic theory, the role of bondage (i.e., of being compelled to recreate
the past with present proxies), the function of regression and its links to defense, and the
requirement of working through to conquer unreflective repetitive (i.e., highly over-
learned) behaviors in daily life. They are but a small sampling of key ideas, which are
symptomatic of what ought to be obvious: Freud was onto so much that the density of his
thoughts overran the language available to express them.
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Endnotes
1. Zwang adds the notion of compulsion, force, or lack of freedom.
2. Proof comes with the paucity of references to Wiederholungszwang in the psychoanalytic
literature after 1939.
3. For example, Fred Pine (1990). Of the two of us, Lavin believes that dual drive theory has
clinical utility. For example it encourages analysts to focus on affiliative and aggressive themes in
the patient’s association that might otherwise be overlooked as sources of conflict, especially when
themes of love and aggression mix in the realm of sexual fantasy; however, Lavin is likely an outlier.
Holowchak suspects Freud’s metapsychology of dual drives’ historical roots, going at least back to
Plato and on through Hume, are deep. Both of us agree the telling objection to realism about dual
drive theories is one that Charles Rycroft (1973) stated clearly. Aside from tradition and authority,
there is no reason for duality. Rycroft noted numerous instincts identified by ethologists. Heuristic
convenience aside, little recommends enshrining dual drive theory as a deep fact about the human
psychical apparatus.
4. In a footnote in chapter 5 of Interpretation of Dreams, Freud spoke of children’s tendency
to repeat ad nauseum things found to be pleasant—a characteristic found equally in neurotics (1976,
SE, IV, p. 268, n. 1).
5. Freud said, “This is our best source of knowledge, and we have since found good reason to
suppose that our patients tell us nothing that we might not also hear from healthy people” (1976, SE,
IX, p. 146).
6. Repression itself is essentially repetitive in the compulsive sense. In “Inhibitions, Symptoms,

and Anxiety,” Freud said, “The fixation factor in repression, then, is the unconscious id’s compul-
sion to repeat—a compulsion which in normal circumstances is only done away with by the freely
mobile function of the ego” (1976, SE, XX, p. 153).
7. See also Freud’s preface to Reik’s Ritual (1976, SE, XVII, p. 262).
8. Freud, S. (1987). A Phylogenetic Fantasy (I. Grubrich-Smitis, Ed.), (pp. 79 – 81). Cambridge,
UK: The Bellnap Press. The passage must be read with caution, to be sure, because this view of
anxiety predates Freud’s ultimate theory of anxiety as a “signal.”
9. Freud also used repetition to explain a colleague’s “oceanic feeling” in the famous first
chapter of “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1976, SE, XXI, pp. 59 –148). That feeling of oneness
with the cosmos, Freud asserted, is no proof of the divine, but instead a wish to return to the womb,
where there is no differentiation between child and mother— especially from the unborn infant’s
nascent perspective. As Kovel (1990) wrote, “the oceanic experience is, at heart, the recapitulation
of an infantile memory, namely, the sense of union of an infant with its mother’s breast. . . . It is
no more than a return, or a kind of memory” (p. 71).
10. Acting out and acting in.
11. For more on how this resistance is a repetition of infantile reactions, see “Observations on
Transference Love” (1976, SE, XII, p. 169) and “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (1976, SE, XXIII,
p. 176).
12. “When you reject something that is disagreeable to you, what you are doing is repeating
the mechanism of constructing dreams rather than understanding it and surmounting it” (1976, SE,
XV, pp. 145–146).
13. As Faveret (2002) elegantly sums, “In transference, repetition may be understood either as
resistance or as motive power behind psychoanalytic therapeutics. Freud believed that transferential
repetition was an alternative to recall—indeed, an inferior form of recall that pointed to the strength
of resistance; but it was the very presence of such repetition that made the psychoanalytical process
possible to begin with” (p. 205).
14. Ellman (1991) wrote, “The therapeutic task is twofold: to attempt to keep the repetition
within the verbal sphere in the analytic situation and to accomplish the therapeutic task of translating
this compulsion back into the terms of the past” (p. 57).
15. Strachey notes that this essay, published in 1919, was a rewriting of an old essay Freud
discovered in a drawer. References to compulsion to repeat are clearly parts of his revision (1976,
SE, XVII, p. 218).
16. Ernest Jones (1957) wrote of the work, “In dealing with such ultimate problems as the
origin and the nature of death Freud displayed a boldness of speculation which was almost
unique in all his writings. . . . It is somewhat discursively written, almost as if by free
associations, and there are therefore occasional gaps in the reasoning . . . . This mode of writing
in itself indicates that the ideas propounded must be transmuted from some personal and
profound source . . .” (p. 266).
17. Freud added in “Moses and Monotheism”: “The [positive effects of traumata] are attempts
to bring the trauma into operation once again—that is, to remember the forgotten experience or,
better still, to make it real, to experience a repetition of it anew, or, even if it was only an early
emotional relationship, to revive it in an analogous relationship with someone else. We summarize
these efforts under the name of ‘fixations’ to the trauma and as a ‘compulsion to repeat.’ . . . A man
who has spent his childhood in an excessive and to-day forgotten attachment to his mother, may
spend his whole life looking for a wife on whom he can make himself dependent and by whom he
can arrange to be nourished and supported. A girl who was made the object of a sexual seduction
in her early childhood may direct her later sexual life so as constantly to provoke similar attacks.”
Negative effects of traumata follow the opposite path: “nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be
remembered and nothing repeated” (1976, SE, XXIII, pp. 75–76).
18. This redefinition of “drive” in may be inconsistent with Freud’s definition of Trieb in
“Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (Freud, 1976, SE, XIV, pp. 109 –140). The former ties into the
body and is genetic; the latter is nonbodily and teleological. Moreover, as with all teleological
reasoning, it suffers etiologically from essaying to explain present behavior in terms of a future state
to be achieved, as if the future could have causal impact on the present. Against this, one might reply
that a telos is not an efficient cause. Instead, it provides, as does fitness, a structural constraint on
what efficient causes can occur, as for example does “fitness” in evolutionary theory.
19. Including vegetative life, as well (1976, SE, XXII, p. 106).

20. See also “The Ego and the Id” (1976, SE, XIX, p. 118), “An Autobiographical Study”
(1976, SE, XX, p. 57), and “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1976, SE, XXII, pp. 106 –107).
21. Hereafter, Freud spoke quite casually of the death drive.
22. See also 1976, SE, XVIII, p. 37.
23. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud stated that order, one characteristic of the anal
personality type, is a compulsion to repeat in some sense. “Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat
which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing
shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision” (1976,
SE, XXI, p. 93). Order removes the possibility of anxiety by providing in advance a sort of blueprint
for behaviors in similar circumstances.
24. For example, see Holt (1989, especially pp. 91–92), Faveret (2002, p. 204), and Schmidt-
Hellerau (1997, pp. 683– 697).
25. The apologist R. J. Bocock (1977) argued that Freud’s shift to the death drive was “rational
and consistent.” Rationality and the data, he said without amplification, necessitated the shift (p.
475).
26. A tact taken, for instance, by Wallace (1982/1983), Jones (1957), Schur (1972), and
Stepansky (1977).
27. For example, Schwartz and Peterfreund (1971).
28. Wrote Lind (1991), “How fundamentally incognito the death drive remained to Freud’s
mind is perhaps also indicated by his inability or unwillingness to give a definite name to it” (pp.
72–73).
29. See also Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau (1997, p. 691).
30. For Richard Wollheim (1971), Freud had two broad classes of repetition. On the one hand,
there are repetitions that enable the psychical apparatus to continue to work over and even master
prior representations of a person’s experience. This work is congruent with the pleasure principle.
On the other hand, Wollheim took it that Feud thought some repetitions go to such an extreme that
the psychical apparatus in relation to them is brought to an early psychical state that is profoundly
primitive and, in the idealized case, empty of energy. This state of zero energy would be a death state
and one “beyond” the pleasure principle. On Wollheim’s reading, this conjecture of Freud, albeit
based on clinical and extraclinical evidence, links the death instinct and Freud’s nirvana principle.
It also, in its emphasis on the defensive move to a profoundly preverbal psychological position,
resonates with the work of Busch (989)1 discussed earlier and, of course, with the modern Kleinian.
In any event, many analysts may well have sympathy for the idea that their patients do exhibit two
conflicting “drives.” Jacques Lacan, like Freud, believed the death drive is a substratal concept of
psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1977b, p. 301). Yet there are two dissimilarities. First, it is never biological
(Lacan, 1977b, p. 102, and Lacan, 1992, pp. 211–212), as it is for Freud. Early on, associated with
the preoedipal phase of psychological development and linked with the suicidal tendency of
narcissism, it is thought to be part of the “imaginary order.” Upon later developing his view of the
imaginary, symbolic, and real, the death drive is now part of the symbolic, not the imaginary, as it
is the “mask of the symbolic order” (Lacan, 1988, p. 326). Second, it is not a drive that is antipodal
to the sexual drives as it is for Freud, but an element of all drives. He wrote that “every drive is
virtually a death drive,” because every drive aims at its own extinction, embroils all persons in
repetition, and extends beyond the pleasure principle, where pleasure is experienced as pain (Lacan,
1977a, p. 844). This excess of enjoyment (jouissance) is a repetitive return to transgression of the
pleasure principle and aims at death (Lacan, 1991, p. 51). André Green (1999a, pp. 205–221), a
former pupil of Lacan, is also interested in preserving the death drive in psychoanalysis. For Green,
the death drive is an “inclination to self-disappearance” that is, through “disobjectualizing function”
(a process by which a person becomes “any object” or even “no object at all.” Thus the death drive,
which functions “for the most part, on the side of repetition” (Green, 2007, pp. 18 –19) is coupled
more to nothingness than to aggression or destructiveness. The negativity of the death drive is linked
with “catastrophic or unthinkable anxieties” and dread of annihilation, breakdown, futility, devi-
talization, and psychic death, as well as sensations of a gap, bottomless holes or abysses. Michel de
M’Uzan (2013) is another French therapist that aims to preserve drive theory. He posited, however,
only the sexual drives, which naturally terminate in death. Each person has a “life program” that
leads to self-extinction. The life program functions through developmental stages to mature and
protect each person, but it also has a “preordained finiteness.” It follows that he has no need of a
“special drive, the so-called death drive” (p. 176). In a manner of speaking, “one dies after having
finished living” (p. xiv). What is the relation between compulsion to repeat and the drives? The
customary conjunction between compulsion to repeat and the death drive, he asserts, has been
responsible for numerous difficulties. No repetition is, in Freud’s words, “perpetual recurrence of the
same thing.” For the most part, each repetition is an altered version of what has been announced
previously (1920, SE, XVII, pp. 4 –5). Repetitions of the identical are special repetitions, which need
not be explicated by reference to a death instinct; they are merely indications of a certain type of
organization that “forms part of an individual’s development” (1920, SE, XVII, p. 15), “never has
a really fatal nature” in neurotics, and rarely completely restricts a subject’s capacity to choose (p.
69). See also Sternbach (1975) and Virsida (2001).
31. For example, LaPlanche (2004, pp. 455– 458), Lear (2000), Rechardt and Ikonen (1991, p.
89), Hiltner (1956, p. 14), and Virsida (2001, pp. 516 –517).
Correction to Håvås, Svartberg, and Ulvenes (2015)
In the article “ATTUNING TO THE UNSPOKEN: The Relationship Between Therapist

Nonverbal Attunement and Attachment Security in Adult Psychotherapy” by Else Håvås,
Martin Svartberg, and Pål Ulvenes, (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2015, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp.
235–254. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038517), there was an error in the reference list.
One of the authors were omitted from the reference. The reference should read as follows:
Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan,
A. C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N., Tronick, E. Z. (1998). Non-interpretive mechanisms in
psychoanalytic therapy. The something more than interpretation. The Process of
Change Study Group. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 903–921.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pap0000024

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Psychoanalytic Psychology © 2015 American Psychological Association

2015, Vol. 32, No. 4, 645– 668 0736-9735/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037859

BEYOND THE DEATH DRIVE:

M. Andrew Holowchak, PhD Michael Lavin, PhD

Literature on Freud’s use of “repetition” exists only insofar as it relates to

Keywords: Freud, repetition, repetition compulsion

This article was published Online First March 23, 2015.

Freud’s Early (Noncompulsive) Uses of “Repetition”

the adult” (1976, SE, V, p. 226).

Games, as a regulated form of play, intensify the joy of recognition, a form of

Freud, Neurosis, and Repetition

astonishingly to establish a phylogenetic antecedent to all transference neuroses—that is,

Repetition as Compulsion in Three Works

“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”

Freud’s first use of compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) occurred in 1914 in his

in a definite field.” We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed

It is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a “compulsion to repeat”

Here, it is the compulsion to repeat unpleasant experiences—an involuntary repetition and

“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

Freud’s Compulsion to Justify the Death Drive

resistance in therapy, casual observations of human behavior, “fated” repetitions, and

“working through.” It is not an example from psychoanalytic psychopathology, perhaps

Consequences of the First Objections to the Death Drive

Consequences for the Pleasure Principle

Overall, it is obvious that Freud blurred different senses of Wiederholungszwang. He

incorporate it into his metapsychology— despite throwing his metapsychology into a

A Nondaemonic “Compulsion to Repeat”

verges on a restatement of Freud’s principle of constancy, a principle that Freud described

Memory and Nonpathology

In therapy, the analyst–analysand exchange builds “background expectations” for thera-

stated, “The compulsion to repeat represents a compulsion to seek a perceptual identity

research at the empirical and conceptual levels by psychoanalysts, biologists, cognitive

Journal of Sociology, 28, 467–480.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

6. Repression itself is essentially repetitive in the compulsive sense. In “Inhibitions, Symptoms,

19. Including vegetative life, as well (1976, SE, XXII, p. 106).

Correction to Håvås, Svartberg, and Ulvenes (2015)

In the article “ATTUNING TO THE UNSPOKEN: The Relationship Between Therapist

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