Repetition compulsion is the term used by Freud to describe the mind’s tendency to repeat traumatic events.

“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it…. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.” – Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freud noted the need for repressed material, however unpleasant, to emerge into consciousness is more powerful than the pleasure principle. It is crucial to understand that the reliving of previously dissociated trauma is experienced as a contemporary event.

“We seem to be dealing here with some internal, systematic error that eludes our perception and control. In fact, the suspicion begins to dawn on us that the more painful the experience, the more we were injured by it, the more likely it is to be woven into something we find ourselves compulsively repeating. This is more than a little unsettling. It feels spooky; Freud used the word “daemonic.” There is some powerful resistance that appears to operate against all efforts at learning to anticipate, to avoid, or to alter the painful repetition.” Paul Russell, Trauma, Repetition and Affect Regulation

This powerful resistance, that feels spooky or even daemonic when subjectively experienced, seems to me to pose almost as much of a problem for our theoretic psychology as it does for our practical living. What could the selective advantage to the organism be in a system that deliberately repeats harrowing experiences from the past, despite our (sometimes frantic) conscious efforts to prevent it?

It like a memory insurance policy that offers protection from painful experience through dissociation. Okay, so dissociate the memories because their too painful, make me repress them so that I can forget it and get on with my life. Great! sign me up! oh, but look at the small print. Later on, once you’ve completely forgotten all about it and are getting on with your life, a subconcious process beyond your control is going to take over your behaviour and force you to recreate situations which as authentically as possible reenact the original dissociated trauma. Um…. let me think about that for a second. Guess I don’t need your dissociative memory insurance policy afer all, mister, what was it, B. Elzebub. Perhaps you could try my neighbour next door, I never did like him much…

more to come, once I’ve done some more research.