Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

October 15, 1963. THE REPETITION COMPULSION AND MATURATIONAL DRIVE REPRESENTATIVES. Theodore Lipin, M.D.

The author reviewed Freud's concept of the repetition compulsion, which should be restricted to the reliving and re-enactment of distressing, unrecallable past experiences without awareness of the connection between past and present. Patients continually relive the derivatives of these experiences in various editions while foregoing gratifications, in order finally to re-create the original one. These activities are 'manifestations of a process aimed toward reorganizing structured functioning in such a way that amnesias resolve' and occur in one of three ways.

The first pattern involves unconscious utilization of currently available internal and external stimuli for unconscious construction of experiential replicas. The second pattern involves unconscious transformation of external reality so that previously absent, required stimuli become available externally. The third pattern involves unconscious transformation of internal milieu so that previously absent, required stimuli, too dangerous or too bizarre for external materialization, become available internally.

Freud's contention that the unconscious activity behind these phenomena is a kind of instinctual drive representative is supported and amplified by the data presented. The theory of instinctual drives was then reviewed with the aim of understanding its relationship to the repetition compulsion, specifically the relationship of the hierarchically ordered drive representations to regulating processes which may exist only in 'higher' layers of psychic organization. The unconscious psychological activity behind manifestations of the repetition compulsion lacks structuring in the usual psychoanalytic sense but may become structured during the course of analytic therapy. In contrast to the usual psychological derivatives of instinctual drive representatives, these representatives are less psychologically