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Also known as Wiederholungszwang

Repeating distressing experiences or patterns instead of remembering them.

Sigmund Freud 1914 Freud named the compulsion to repeat in 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914): what the patient cannot remember is repeated in action, above all in the transference, and this repetition serves the resistance. Ferenczi and Rank take that paper as their starting point and credit Freud with having since shown, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the overriding importance of the repetition compulsion in the neuroses.

Sigmund Freud 1919 In 'The Uncanny' Freud traces the compulsion to repeat to the drives themselves: it rules the unconscious, is strong enough to override the pleasure principle, shows in small children's strivings and in the course of an analysis, and whatever recalls it is felt as uncanny. For the full account he points to a work already written, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Sándor Ferenczi 1924 With Rank, Ferenczi makes the repetition compulsion the ground of analytic technique. The decisive material was never conscious and can only be repeated, so repetition in the analytic situation is to be allowed and even provoked, then turned into present memory. Remembering itself is treated as one form of the repetition compulsion.
Otto Rank 1924 With Ferenczi, Rank makes the repetition compulsion the ground of analytic technique. The decisive material was never conscious and can only be repeated, so repetition in the analytic situation is to be allowed and even provoked, then turned into present memory. Remembering itself is treated as one form of the repetition compulsion.

Pleasure principle 1919 Freud describes a compulsion to repeat that springs from the drives and is strong enough to override the pleasure principle. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) works this out: the compulsion repeats even experiences that never brought pleasure, and so works beyond, and against, the pleasure principle.