An Aspect of the Repetition Compulsion1

I have tried in this paper to discuss the apparently passive repetition compulsion. Freud (3) showed that these repetition-compulsion patients are attempting to master anxiety that would otherwise be experienced as overwhelming. I am suggesting that the anxiety that these patients are struggling against is anxiety associated with dependence; that feelings of dependence and need stimulate intense envy and hatred towards the primary object, and therefore what these patients unconsciously fear is intense ambivalence, guilt, and depression. This they particularly fear since they have an inner conviction that their earliest aggression has reduced their internal object to an extremely perilous or destroyed condition—which they cannot face. Their method of avoiding this depressive anxiety is to avoid the experience of dependence by the use of the splitting, projective and introjective identification combination of defences that I have been describing. These patients therefore get caught in an insoluble situation; they cannot face ambivalence and guilt and so cannot reach and work through the depressive position; they retreat from it by the use of defences belonging to the paranoid schizoid position, so that they are subsequently faced with manifold persecutions. Their particular method of splitting and fusion with the idealized object protects them from psychosis, but their inability to tolerate ambivalence, conflict, and therefore integration obviates the possibility of normality.

I want now briefly to make a very tentative concluding connexion between what Freud said about the repetition compulsion and the death instinct and what I have been suggesting here. Freud postulated that the repetition compulsion was a manifestation of the death instinct at work, describing the death instinct as tending towards the reinstatement of a previous state of existence, in the final issue to an inorganic state. Following