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When Freud and Breuer noticed their patients tended to repeat their symptoms, this was one of the phenomena prompting them so seek the underlying process that produced such symptoms and enabled the observer-therapist to understand them. The failure of the hypnotic and cathartic methods made Freud realise that patients suffered from reminiscences in a much more profound, extensive and complex sense than had initially been apparent. The theoretical speculations prompted by this realisation led Freud to work out a general system of the mental processes underlying psychopathology, which culminated in the development of the abstract concepts presented in his papers on metapsychology.
In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914), and even more so in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) — henceforth to be referred to as RRW and BPP respectively — Freud resumed his discussion of the phenomena of repetition and their relationship with memory, partly to recapitulate and partly to broaden his speculations, which he could now base on fairly solid and proven theoretical