Repetition Compulsion

Arthur F. Valenstein opened the panel by defining the two aspects, clinical and theoretical, that had prompted Freud to develop his concept of the repetition compulsion. He described Freud's concern with certain clinical phenomena: the fact that apparently well-analyzed patients failed to lose their symptoms or developed equivalent ones; the problem of destiny neurosis; and the occurrence of repetitions in analysis, which had suggested to Freud the existence of an innate, instinctual tendency to repeat unpleasant experiences that could not be explained by the pleasure principle. Although this phenomenon led Freud to a major revision of instinct theory, to a dualistic concept of aggressive and sexual drives, of primary destructiveness invested in the self and of primary masochism comparable to primary narcissism, the concept of the repetition compulsion, according to Valenstein, remained a clinical construct and became an important part of clinical psychoanalysis.

At the same time, "in keeping with a philosophic predilection … for ultimate questions, " Freud used the repetition compulsion as the basis for a more speculative, abstract, general theory of the life and death instincts, "a superordinal theory of the second order, " including the dual instinct theory but extending metapsychology into the realms of biology and metaphysics, beyond the theoretical requirements of clinical psychoanalysis. Thus the theory of the life and death instincts is a biological rather than a psychological one, but, Valenstein proposed, there is no true contradiction. Psychoanalysis itself is a psychology derived from biology and, as it becomes increasingly a developmental psychology concerned with the earliest phases of life, biological considerations are increasingly important.

Valenstein concluded with a plea that we maintain a clear distinction between clinical and theoretical aspects of the repetition compulsion. He hoped that we could do justice to both, as long as our discussi