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The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP; 2020, 101 (6):1162–1214) devoted a section to the repetition compulsion. It provided an overview of the hypotheses that have been formulated as to its genesis. After a brief review of these, I would, however, like to introduce an additional hypothesis. It seems to me that, in addition to those presented, it could be argued that the repetition compulsion has no other purpose than … repetition itself. Can we even talk, strictly speaking, about a “purpose” or is repetition more just an automatism or some kind of self-replicating programme?
Here, very schematically, are some of the hypotheses mentioned in the IJP: In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914) Freud indicated that repetition could testify to a repressed meaning remaining active until remembered. The analytic treatment, allowing this remembering, in particular by the working-through in the transference, was to enable the lifting of this repression and, consequently, the end of the repetition. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), he indicated other possible meanings of pathological repetitions. These could be seen as bringing its pleasure quotient to a severely punitive superego. But it could also respond to disturbances to the psyche’s protective shield by excessive (and therefore traumatic) quantities. By reversing activity and passivity and by enabling identification with the aggressor, it offered the prospect of mastery.
Weiss, not without emphasizing that repetition could have different sources and could thus be “a river with different tributary streams” (Weiss 2020, 1172–1187), insisted that repetition could, particularly from a Kleinian perspective, arise from the impossibility of accessing a sufficiently symbolized unconscious reparation process. Access to which, especially when dreams finally arrive during treatment, can make it possible to shed the repetition.
Blass recalls that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, although