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All human behaviour and experience can be studied and explained at different levels, including social, political, biological, chemical, physical and psychological. Within each level there can be further subdivisions: the person's behaviour can be explained neurologically and hormonally, in terms of evolution and class theories, behaviourism or psychoanalysis, etc.
At the start of his letter regarding the series of papers on repetition compulsion that appeared in a previous issue of the IJP (2020, 101:1162–1214), Sanchez-Cardenas claims that he will briefly review the papers and then offer an additional hypothesis. In practice, however, what he does is this: he sums up the papers in a line or two, stressing their concern with motives and meanings, especially conflictual ones; and then he turns to present a number of additional hypotheses of his own that do not have this concern, but rather regard repetition as purposeless and meaningless, non-psychical “automatisms”. The brevity and specific focus of the summaries of the earlier series of papers limit and distort their content, and the presentation of the additional hypotheses misleadingly suggests that they are relevant to psychoanalytic discourse. They are not. In eschewing meaning, purpose, motive and conflict, in turning away from what is precisely psychical – all defining features of psychoanalytic explanation – Sanchez-Cardenas’ explanations are essentially non-analytic. That is, the explanations he offers may be valid, but they are from learning theory, attachment theory, neuropsychology and non-analytic theories of culture and cognition. Juxtaposing them with quotations from Bion and Ferro, or putting them under a heading of “psychoanalytic thought”, does not change this fact.
Counter to his explicit intention, at some points he does seem to be speaking of meaning. This is when Sanchez-Cardenas offers the idea that repetition is sought because of the security and limits it provides through familiarity and const