REPETITION COMPULSION

There are intrapsychic conflicts that cause a person to act committing the same unpleasant experiences over and over again, no matter how old they are, the subject lives them as they have been motivated by their current situation. It is placed in painful situations without being aware that they reproduce ancient experiences and that it is still defenseless before them.

Trauma is via regia to access repetition, there is a restorative tendency in this compulsion that would be a function that would try to reestablish the situation prior to trauma and for it the mind uses repetitive phenomena to benefit the Self.

From certain events that we can not experience, the unconscious elements can not be symbolized and a process of repetition will begin, it is necessary to glimpse that there is behind what struggles to leave that he wants to tell us, Freud spoke of the “destiny neurosis “ that would be one failure after another without any apparent logic.

The repetition appears in different clinical phenomena: as in the obsessive symptoms where handwashing is ritualized repeatedly, the components that are reiterated are certain inhibitions, unusable tendencies, pathological character traits. The uncontrollable compulsion is linked to suffering, either of the person himself or of those around him, where the failure of repression as defensive psychodynamics is the main cause of its expression.

The contents that have remained repressed or misunderstood return again and again in the form of symptoms or inadequate behaviors, observing a self-destructive tendency that insists, does not cease. Only a therapy, focused on addressing the causes of pathological symptoms, may have the possibility of finding a way to cure, that which persists in expressing itself but can not be remembered.