Some Considerations regarding the Phenomenology of the Repetition Compulsion and the Death Instinct

When an author experiences the reappearance in print of a piece of his own writing of 40 years ago, he cannot help but be seized with the uncanny feeling of encountering his double. He knows that the person he is hearing is himself, though the revenant is speaking a now foreign tongue, a language belonging to an altogether different time, place, and intellectual climate, linked to a period he may have vainly aimed to forget. He also cannot help wondering how those who have known him in his later years as a fellow member of the American Psychoanalytic Association will respond to the strange voice that they hear speaking in the pages of this first paper.

It is because of the enormous gap in thought and method of reasoning between the early paper and much later ones, that I feel an obligation to the editors of this Annual who generously offered to reprint my paper (which I have translated into English, and edited for the present-day reader) to write these introductory remarks.

It is obvious that the paper was not written by a psychoanalyst. It clearly reflects the powerful influence of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who shaped my philosophical thinking as a student. But, in my own judgment, the paper shows the even greater impact of Freud's ideas on the development of my own approach to the problems of the human condition. It was under the influence of Freud that I was impelled to raise a number of basic questions that existentialism, in my

opinion, has never answered. While my suggested answers to these questions in this first paper differ considerably from those which I attempted to formulate in later papers,1 the questions have remained essentially unchanged. These questions deal first with the issue of permanence within change (temporality), which appears in the early paper but is equally central for the identity concept developed later in “Identity and Sexuality.” Second, there is the continuity of the quest for a specific psychological function of sexuality in man outside of procreativity. It is assumed that this function goes beyond the aim of reduction of sexual tension. Both the early paper and the later ones see sexuality as effecting a heightened sense of being for the individual, though there are differences in the psychological understanding of such a state between the early and the later papers. Third, the question is raised whether aggression, even destruction, is not linked to man's unconscious striving to transcend his transitoriness by means of aggrandizing his sense of self by control and domination of other persons and nature. This “will to existential affirmation,” and not a death instinct, may account for human aggression. Finally, Freud's insights into a principle beyond the pleasure principle form a central theme in the first paper. The thesis that Freud had perceived in the repetition compulsion a key to the concept of identity maintenance—continuity of personal identity within temporality—is taken up 20 years later in “Identity and Sexuality.”

I may add that these apparent continuities came as a surprise to me, since I had not read my early paper for many years—perhaps in an effort to extinguish the memory of a period when questions of life and death, of meaning and absurdity, confronted everybody most personally and directly. Olinick (1957), in an inspired paper on “Questioning and Pain, Truth and Negation,” says: “Etymologically, historically, and psychologically, linkages are demonstrable between questioning, the search for knowledge and truth, the pain of torture and ordeal, guilt and anxiety, and sense of justice.” If he is right, I am willing to believe that the radical questioning concerning “Being” and “Nothingness” that pervades my early paper is a necessary corollary to the circumstances

under which it was written: Through unconscious perseverance of this questioning, the transition from “then” to “now” became possible without a break in the sense of inner continuity.