Concept
Repetition compulsion
Overview
Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances. This may take the form of symbolically or literally re-enacting the event, or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to occur again. Repetition compulsion can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and in cases of psychosis, may even be hallucinated.
As a "key component in Freud's understanding of mental life, 'repetition compulsion' ... describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Repetition compulsion is discussed.
In the light of such observations as these, drawn from the behaviour during transference and from the fate of human beings, we may venture to make the assumption that there really exists in psychic life a repetition-compulsion, which goes beyond the pleasure-principle. We shall now also feel disposed to relate to this compelling force the dreams of shock-patients and the play-impulse in children.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle
names the idea; opens on it
The obsessional neurosis[45] takes this form: the patient’s mind is occupied with thoughts that do not really interest him, he feels impulses which seem alien to him, and he is impelled to perform actions which not only afford him no pleasure but from which he is powerless to desist. The thoughts (obsessions) may be meaningless in themselves or only of no interest to the patient; they are often absolutely silly; in…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
states what it is
The property of causing such a cycle of occurrences is called "discomfort"; the property of the mental occurrences in which the cycle ends is called "pleasure." The actions constituting the cycle must not be purely mechanical, i.e. they must be bodily movements in whose causation the special properties of nervous tissue are involved.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
states what it is
We may define "compulsion" as follows: "Any set of circumstances is said to compel A when A desires to do something which the circumstances prevent, or to abstain from something which the circumstances cause." This presupposes that some meaning has been found for the word "cause"--a point to which I shall return later.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Many phenomena that belong here escape ordinary observation, because their continuous repetition makes us insensitive to them. In those cases where an impression was accompanied by a very strong feeling-tone, and where its return is accompanied by a totally different affective state, we notice distinctly how the original feeling-tone becomes modified owing to the changed background. Thus every psychical process…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
Related ideas
- Child
- Abingdon-on-Thames
- Latin
- Psychosis
- Sigmund Freud
- Erik Erikson
- Dream
- Hallucination
- Penguin Books
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- MIT Press
- Routledge
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of love.