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.
It is not in vain that I underline a contrast each of us readily identifies: analysts usually agree on the clinical notion of repetition, whereas interpreting this phenomenon always stirs up controversies, not to say passionate confrontations. The ambiguities and contradictions found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which Freud in no way tried to hide, are themselves part of the situation. We know that only Ferenczi, Eitingon, and Alexander totally welcomed the highly speculative views developed in this work. For his part, Freud did not hesitate to write that “the third step in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two earlier ones” (Freud 1920, p. 59).
In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), he explicitly maintains the clinical value of the previous instinctual duality. Finally, in the 1920s, when it emerged that there was enormous disappointment about the therapeutic range of analysis—a fact that we perhaps underestimate—a very agitated Wilhelm Reich personally questioned Freud, asking him if his real intention was to introduce the death instinct as a clinical theory. Freud replied, “It was only a hypothesis”; he advised Reich not to worry about it and continue his clinical work (see Reich 1927).
In these few preliminary remarks, I find myself without doubt already going against the trend of current positions taken most often about the repetition compulsion. A delicate undertaking, I