You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud’s attitude to the compulsion to repeat changed over the years. At first he was frustrated that patients repeated their history rather than remembering it, but in what I have always considered to be sign of his genius, he came to recognise that this repetition was precisely what made therapeutic change possible. Because of the compulsion to repeat, patients were able — indeed, they were compelled — to relive their experiences in the transference. This presented a new opportunity for understanding and change. As Freud put it: “We admit it [the compulsion to repeat] into the transference. … [And in this way] we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing [the patient’s] ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference-neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work” (1914b, p. 154).
However, Freud gradually realised that the compulsion to repeat also expressed a resistance to change. He came to consider that the analysis of resistance was a central task for the analyst. Later he became convinced that the resistance to change was particularly unyielding in certain patients who seemed senselessly to persist in seeking outcomes which led only to unhappiness and suffering. He noted that, in these situations, patients seem to be unable to learn from experience. Instead, they behave as if “pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power …” (Freud, 1920, p. 21).
Freud was pessimistic about the possibility of change in patients under the influence of the repetition compulsion. However, I believe that further understanding of the factors involved allows us to consider that, as with other repetitions, the emergence of the repetition
compulsion in the transference gives the analyst a chance of understanding it and of “transforming it into a transference repetition which can be cured by therapeutic work”. Of course, central to this argument is the question of whether we can understand it. By placin