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THE INSISTENT, REPETITIVE NEED to cling to self defeating behaviors, interactions, and feeling states makes psychoanalytic treatment long and arduous. Even after careful exploration of the psychodynamic meanings of repetitive patterns the patient is often unable to fully relinquish these maladaptive responses. What important functions do these painful repetitions serve? Why are they so persistent? How can we alter our psychoanalytic approach to more forcefully confront and diminish this "compulsion to repeat"?
The relationship between repetition, transference, and resistance which Freud elaborated in Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through(1914) remains a cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. Freud viewed repetition as a part of the ego's defensive apparatus which functions in the service of resistance. "These repetitions which emerge with such unwished for exactitude always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life." (Freud, 1920) He argued that the tendency to repeat early patterns increases