Concept
Repetition compulsion
Repeating distressing experiences or patterns instead of remembering them.
Development
1914
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924)
1919
developed by Sigmund Freud
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).
In The 'Uncanny' (1919)
1924
developed by Sándor Ferenczi
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.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924)
1924
developed by Otto Rank
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.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924)
1926
reworked by Sigmund Freud
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts the compulsion in the terms of the structural theory. It is the repetition compulsion of the unconscious id that fixates repression, so that a new impulse follows the path of the repressed as if the old danger still existed. It is also the resistance of the unconscious, which remains to be overcome after the ego has given up its own resistance.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
Relations
introduced by
- 1914 Sigmund Freud
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.
developed by
- 1919 Sigmund Freud
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).
- 1924 Sándor Ferenczi
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.
- 1924 Otto Rank
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.
opposes
- 1919 Pleasure principle
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.
reworked by
- 1926 Sigmund Freud
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts the compulsion in the terms of the structural theory. It is the repetition compulsion of the unconscious id that fixates repression, so that a new impulse follows the path of the repressed as if the old danger still existed. It is also the resistance of the unconscious, which remains to be overcome after the ego has given up its own resistance.
gave rise to
- 1926 Working through
Freud grounds working through in the repetition compulsion. Even after the ego has resolved to give up its resistances, the power of the repetition compulsion, the pull of the unconscious prototypes on the repressed drive process, still has to be overcome. This resistance of the unconscious is what makes working through necessary.
Works
- 1919
Freud's essay, published in the fifth volume of Imago in 1919, takes up a question he says aesthetics has neglected: what sets the uncanny apart within the wider class of the frightening. Against Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 traced the feeling to intellectual uncertainty before the new and unfamiliar, Freud argues that the uncanny is the kind of fright that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. He reaches this by two routes. The first is linguistic: entries from the dictionaries of Sanders and of the Grimms show heimlich ranging from 'homely, familiar' to 'concealed, secret', until it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Schelling's remark that the uncanny is whatever ought to have remained hidden and has come to light becomes a key to the essay. The second route is a survey of uncanny experiences and fictions. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', Freud places the story's effect not in the automaton Olimpia but in the figure who tears out children's eyes, and reads the fear for the eyes as a substitute for castration anxiety, with the good and the bad father split across the tale's paired figures. Following Otto Rank's study of the double, he shows the double turning from an insurance against death, born of primary narcissism, into a harbinger of death, and links it to the self-observing, self-critical agency in the ego. Involuntary repetition of the same, which he ties to a compulsion to repeat in the unconscious, the omnipotence of thoughts, the evil eye, the return of the dead, severed limbs, being buried alive, and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality are traced in turn to infantile complexes or to surmounted animistic beliefs. The female genitals, which neurotic men often call uncanny, he reads as the entrance to the human being's first home: the prefix 'un-' is the mark of repression. In the last section Freud concedes that his thesis cannot be reversed, and that fairy tales abound in wish-fulfilments and animated objects that are not uncanny at all. He answers these objections by separating the uncanny of experience from the uncanny of fiction and, within experience, the uncanny that comes from repressed infantile complexes from the uncanny that arises when surmounted primitive beliefs seem confirmed once more. Fiction can suspend reality-testing and so spare us the uncanny, as in fairy tales, in Dante, or in Shakespeare's ghosts, or it can heighten the uncanny beyond anything life allows when the writer pretends to stay within common reality. The uncanny of repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. Because the writer also steers the reader's identification and mood, the same material can turn comic, as in Nestroy or in Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost'. The uncanniness of solitude, silence and darkness Freud leaves tied to the anxiety of childhood.
- 1924
The Development of Psychoanalysis
Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (1924; in English, The Development of Psychoanalysis, 1925) is a short programmatic book by Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, issued as the first number of Freud's series Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse. According to its preface, it grew out of conversations in the summer of 1922: Ferenczi drafted the critical part and Rank the positive section on the analytic situation. The two revised the whole together after Freud, at the Berlin congress of September 1922, set a prize question on how analytic technique and theory had influenced each other. They adapted the text to that question but withdrew from the competition. The book argues that psychoanalysis had grown from a therapeutic procedure into a vast body of theory while its technique lagged behind, leaving many analysts disoriented and too closely bound to Freud's few technical papers. Starting from Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914) and the repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the authors give repetition, rather than remembering, the leading role in treatment: the decisive unconscious material was never conscious, so it can only be reproduced in the relation to the analyst, where it must be understood and turned into present memory. Rank's section describes analysis as a time-limited process of libidinal flow, set going and carried by transference. The analyst stays largely passive and intervenes, like a catalyst, where resistance marks a neurotic deviation. Ego resistances give way to a transference in which the clinical neurosis is converted into a transference neurosis that revives the Oedipal "primal neurosis". Frustration keeps affects from discharging prematurely and drives the libido back to its points of fixation. A final phase of "weaning" dissolves the transference, and for it the analyst sets a fixed end date. Abreaction remains the healing agent, but its affects now run their course in the relation to the analyst rather than being tied to recovered memories. Ferenczi's historical-critical section reviews techniques that had stalled at earlier stages of psychoanalytic knowledge: collecting associations, dictionary-like translation of symbols, symptom analysis, "complex analysis", mechanically uncovering the stages of libido theory, speculative, phylogenetic and anagogic interpretation, lecturing patients, calling every stall a resistance, and both rigid passivity and "wild activity". It names the analyst's own narcissism as a source of error, and holds that the unconscious proper, never experienced, can only be relived piecemeal in the present, as a "fractionated catharsis". A chapter on theory and practice distinguishes intellectual knowledge from conviction gained through experience, and presents Freud's work as a "circulus benignus" in which each corrects the other. The authors see psychoanalysis moving from a phase of knowledge (Erkenntnisphase) to a phase of experience (Erlebnisphase). They conclude that a training analysis should not differ from a therapeutic one, that the patient's excess of knowledge should give way to the analyst's greater knowledge, and that technique will grow simpler, perhaps even readmitting hypnosis and suggestion, while psychoanalytic knowledge becomes common to all physicians and to therapists who are not physicians. Published in the same year as Rank's The Trauma of Birth, the book became a point of contention within Freud's inner circle.
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Development of Psychoanalysis1924Evidence for a relation
- The 'Uncanny'1919Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation