Findings suggest that repetition compulsion is clinically detectable. Two categories of drive representatives are delineated: maturational and structural. The former produces progressive unfolding of structured functioning according to a genetic timetable until adult organization materializes; the latter involves processes that maintain the integrity of the structured functioning in any one phase of the timetable. A deficiency of experiences essential to the proper discharge of these representatives results in discharge blockage of the former and distortions of the latter. The structural representatives come to subserve tension discharge in such a way as to inhibit and distort maturational representatives rather than further them. One clinical manifestation of this intrasystemic id conflict is repetition compulsion.