The author sets out to study repetition compulsion from the viewpoint of the opposition of the 'same' and the 'identical'. He states that there exist two conceptions of the past: an 'interior rewriting' of experience and a statement of events without such editing. The first condition describes neurotics and 'normals' who establish a transference neurosis in analysis; repetitions in these patients merely approximate the antecedent events. Individuals using the second conception of the past, repeat the identical phenomena as if their memories had not been 'processed'. Their exactness of repetition is manifest in the identity of tone of voice, use of verbal stereotypes and tics of language, and in a tendency