Repetition compulsion

Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This "re-living" can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucination.

The term can also be used to cover the repetition of behaviour or life patterns more broadly: a "key component in Freud's understanding of mental life, 'repetition compulsion'...describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life."

Sigmund Freud's use of the concept of "repetition compulsion" (German: Wiederholungszwang) was 'articulated...for the first time, in the article of 1914, Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten ('Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.') Here he noted how 'the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it....For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical toward his parents' authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor'.

He explored the repetition compulsion further in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describing four aspects of repetitive behavior, all of which seemed odd to him from the point of view of the mind's quest for pleasure/avoidance of unpleasure.

The first was the way 'dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident' rather than, for example, 'show[ing] the patient pictures from his healthy past'.

The second came from children's play. Freud reported observing a child throw his favorite toy from his crib, become upset at the loss, then reel the toy back in, only to repeat this action. Freud theorized that the child was attempting to master the sensation of loss 'in allowing his mother to go away without protesting', but asked in puzzlement 'How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?'.

The third was the way (noted in 1914) that the patient, exploring in therapy a repressed past, 'is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of...remembering it as something belonging to the past....the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way'.

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