Theoretical Work

Repetition Compulsion

Neurotic suffering develops without apparent organic cause. To understand and treat it, therefore, we must search beyond the body into the broader domains of human psychic and social experience, where cause and effect find expression through unconscious and symbolic means. The covertness of its cause, however, is not what brings neurotic pain to clinical attention. Neurotics seek help because their discomfort does not cease, but repeats in subjectively meaningless and vicious cycles that limit their freedom and stereotype their lives. Neurotics are not stupid but they fail to learn from painful experience, which they repeat as if compelled. A neurotic symptom, whether somatic, psychic, or social in its domain of expression, always appears to express a compulsion to repeat. To repeat what? In what form? And compelled by what forces? From his earliest clinical encounters to his final theoretical musings, Freud struggled with these questions, but never fully answered them.

From its outward presentation as symptom, Freud traced the repetition compulsion to its vanishing point at the threshold of consciousness. Here the symptom's loss of apparent meaning marked the intervention of repression, a process to which he ascribed a protective function. Thus from his reflection on the clinical phenomenology of repetition, Freud's topographical theory arose, with its conscious, preconscious, and unconscious theaters of expression. So, too, came a general theory of symptom-formation: instinctual drives, abrupted prior to awareness, find conscious expression in symbolic form. But the symbolic "solution" cannot resolve the actual conflict, so that it (the symptom) repeats with futile and frustrating results, in the process preventing more tangible success. The symptom, in short, is a symbol that does not satisfy, but instead inhibits the resolution of conflict between the self and its surround. To an observer, the symptom arises at the border between action and symbol, calling for help from either side, as if pleading, "How do I translate these impulses into action, or these actions into words"? Because the symbolic solution brings no fruition, the neurotic activity is repeated: A tiresome, irrational expression of covert and conflicted, emotionally laden biological drives.

What makes biological drives so problematic? They interfere with the demands of social life. Man must simultaneously possess himself and belong meaningfully to his world. From this line of thought, Freud developed his structural and economic theories. The demands of Nature (biology) vs. Nurture (society) create conflict. In response, the human mind splits into the Id, Ego and Superego. Repetitions in clinical psychopathology as well as in everyday life result from repeated efforts to resolve such discord in ways that are not optimal. Thus from the literal to the symbolic to the underlying biological, Freud traced the "what" of repetition, but in doing so only changed his level of discourse, not yet explaining the "why' of the compulsion to repeat.

If we seek pleasure ultimately, why do people keep doing what hurts? Explaining why neurotic suffering occurs posed perhaps the most obdurate challenge of Freud's career as a theoretician. From his earliest writings to his last, he tried to find a motive for repetition in the pleasure principle, generally by reducing all habitual--but unsatisfying--action to "the one major habit, the primal addiction," namely, masturbation--the symbolic coition, that does not satisfy (Freud, 1897, p.272). Yet Freud balked at the fact that repetition, on balance, compels mare suffering than it dispels--it is, after all, what defines the neurotic's suffering, brings him into treatment and generates the transference that resists his cure. To explain this, we must go "beyond the pleasure principle". In his essay by that name, Freud found in the repetition compulsion evidence of a second instinctual prime mover operating alongside, at times even prevailing beyond, the demands of Eros. The death instinct, Thanatos, he felt forced to conclude, also rules human destiny. Despite the apparent contradictions that this solution entails (e.g., it appears inconsistent with his masturbation theory), Freud held fast to this conclusion until the end of his writing career, even though, he confessed, "I am not convinced myself". Since Freud's time, other writers have tried to resolve its paradoxes--by positing an urge for active mastery, for example, or a drive toward self-possession, or a halting growth toward affect-competency, but regardless of theoretical perspective the repetition compulsion remains among the most vexing problems of psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

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David W. Mann