Loewald’s Repetition Compulsion

“I have implied that the Oedipus complex—itself already a repetition of pre-oedipal experiences on a new organizational level—is repeated not just in puberty but throughout life, in varying mixtures and combinations of more or less passive reproductions ('neurotic' repetitions) and of active re-creations…The dissolution (not repression) of the oedipal conflict, to the extent to which it succeeds, in its aspects of mourning and internalization of abandoned object-relations, with the erection of the superego as a new differentiation in the ego, is a prime example of re-creative repetition in the psychic field—in contrast to passive reproduction in the psychic field represented by the perpetuation of oedipal fantasies or pathological introjections. Internal recreative repetitions of external involvement and its dissolution enable the individual to progress to repetitive mastery of the Oedipus complex…” – Excerpts from Loewald’s paper on the Repetition Compulsion (1971)

I was struck by the excerpt above while reading Loewald’s paper recently, likely due to my recent post about the relationship of repetition to psychotherapy.  My understanding is that the person from whom I learned the most about this concept was colleagues with Paul Russell, who in fact did his training analysis with Loewald.  So unsurprising that something like this should show up in one of Loewald’s papers. 

Loewald goes a long way in his paper to distinguish between two different types of repeating, which he calls reproduction and recreation.  The analogue for these is whether we engage in the process passively (reproduction/compulsion) or whether we do so actively (recreation through ego modification).  Loewald can, like so many other psychoanalysts, get caught up in some pretty jargon heavily language.  The above referenced paper offers nothing as sensuous and phenomenological as you can sometimes be offered in a good psychoanalytic paper.  It is strict ego-psychology through and through.   Which seems odd to me since, reputationally, Loewald maintains the status of being one of the more revolutionary and mystical thinkers in the realm of psychoanalysis, perhaps on par with Bion and a few others.  My sense is this paper may be a bit of an outlier for Loewald on that front (though notably he uses the last few pages of the paper to engage in a more philosophical and anthropological survey of repetition).  I also wonder if there is something about feeling like the only way to make some revolutionary inferences about what the psyche is or does with respect to the analytic tradition was via the Trojan Horse of psychoanalysis’ existing and proliferating jargon at the time Loewald was doing most of his writing (sidenote: this was written before recent reading some of Stephen Mitchell’s work on Loewald, where he posits some reasons as to why Loewald felt it important to use language in a new way rather than try to develop new language).

However, despite the clinical nature of the language, there is a real beauty in the above segment.  I highlighted the chunk of it which I am most enthralled by, but the entire thing speaks to the melancholy nature of growth and human development.  The simplified version of what Loewald is saying here goes something like what I was discussing in my recent post on repetition.  We carry our pasts forward with us, as past largely characterized by relational tendencies born out of the relationships we maintained with our early caregivers.  That which gets carried forward gets repeated in myriad ways, with the degree to which we feel as though we have some agency over how it gets repeated rooted in the degree to which we have successfully grieved those past relationships.  And we need to grieve both the good and the bad, either in terms of that which we were never given and must mourn, or that which we were given and now must do the difficult work of providing for ourselves or seeking anew as we grow out of the strictly dependent position of infancy.  Norman O. Brown called this the Oedipal Project: it’s not that we want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers in the strictest terms, but that we learn in the process of absence and separation that we must take ownership of our own wellbeing, we become the “creator and sustainer of our own existence”.

We can debate whether this project can ever be fully realized or not, but it seems important that Loewald centers the process of change around grief and mourning.  That and the use of the word dissolution to discuss what happens to the repetition is particularly poignant.  So much of lived experience can be constructed through the lens of grieving and letting go (some of these ways are brilliantly outlined in Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses).   Though it is hard to find just the right language to describe what it is we must do with our repetitions beyond grieving them.  In someways, the idea of grieving alone feels insufficient, as we’ve already acknowledged the repetition compulsion, as understood here, cannot be let go of or gotten past.  We will always carry it with us.  I think the language I find most useful is that of Heidegger, in which he says we must “take over” our thrownness.  If we understand the repetition compulsion as one of the things we are “thrown into” as a matter of our Beingness, then I think it is quite right to say that Loewald’s “recreating” and “repetitive mastery” is something like the taking over of that which we are destined to repeat.

Therapy’s answer for how we do this is through relationship.  We allow the repetition to unfold in the transference, we hold, we respond, we attend, we make appeals, and (occasionally) we interpret.  We become the vessel for containing, playing with, and working towards an authentic relationship to one’s thrown possibilities, while simultaneously holding and responding to our own (the deliberate working through for the therapist comes in their own therapy/supervision, though it is likely in any good therapy we are ourselves always working through something).  We do not rid the client of their repetitive patterns but maintain a space for the re-creation of them in novel and interesting ways.  It is a dissolution of the pasts tyranny over determining our present.  And a subsequent reestablishing of an openness we can experience ourselves into anew, while also very much the same.