Repetition and Memory
It’s a common experience in the process of doing therapy, whether it comes up after three weeks, three months, or three years, that a client will say something along the lines of “I can’t believe I’m still talking about this” or “It feels like I just come in and do the same thing week after week” or “It feels like I’m talking myself in circles”. Whether the individual is frustrated by that fact, finds amusement in it, appeals to you to do something about it, or expresses any of a number of other myriad responses, will tell you something about the nature of the therapy as it is unfolding between the two of you. Nonetheless, the repetition persists. It may also be the most functionally important part of any therapy approached from a relational lens.
Repetition has an interesting place in the history of philosophy and therapy. It was a principle that received a lot of attention in the phenomenological work of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; it was of interest to the early Greek philosophers (notably Aristotle and his discussion of habits and time); and since the early years of the psychoanalytic tradition, many have tried to take up the mantle of making sense of the fact that we seem to embroil ourselves in (variations of) the same problems over and over again. Often, the idea of memory is implicated in these discussions. The notion of habit could be conceptualized as our capacity to take something that must be remembered to be done and turning it into something more implicit or intuitive that we just do, to the point that one could say we are that behavior. Kierkegaard juxtaposed recollection and repeating as they apply to the taking over of one’s own subjectivity. Even Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, though to my recollection does not talk about memory directly, seems to posit the question “If you could remember each instance of the reliving of your own life, would you choose to do it in exactly the same manner you already are doing it each and every time?”
For Freud, the relationship between repetition and memory became deliberately implicated in the way he developed his ideas about psychopathology. In his model, the unwanted repetitive behaviors we are prone to are the consequence of the “trace of a memory” of something that is embedded in the unconscious. We repeat because we can’t remember. At least not in the explicit, fully conscious way we typically mean when we talk about the process of remembering. But, somewhat insidiously, we also repeat because we can’t forget. These ideas overlapped with the role of repression in early psychoanalysis and drove developments in treatment’s early form with respects to issues related to technique and theory.
Fairbairn’s attempts at defining the repetition compulsion shifted the focus into object-relations and the world of splitting and good/bad objects. For a full explanation, I’d direct anyone who is curious to Greenberg and Mitchell’s section on Fairbairn in their book on object-relations. Essentially, the argument is that the repetition compulsion—and our tendency towards self-defeating behaviors—are a consequence of our early relationships. No one’s internalized relationships with the outside world are without some scars, and our inclination is to repeat these patterns in the context of later relationships. Fairbairn noted the myriad sophisticated ways we could do this, via selecting an object who of their own accord mirrors those qualities, treating the object in such a way as to induce that response, imagining it where it may not otherwise exist, and on and on.
I think the most important sensitivity to develop in the work of doing therapy is the one that attunes itself to what is being repeated. The challenging piece of this has to do with the fact that that which is getting repeated may not always necessarily take on the same form or be easy to see. I liken it to our breath, often invisible, but in the right conditions (such as the frosty chill of a brisk New England winter) full, smoky, and opaque. Sometimes it will be months before I will suddenly realize the subtle interpersonal patterns that have characterized the threads connecting much of the work with a specific client. The challenge then becomes not one necessarily of satisfying or frustrating the need that is being reenacted (as per the old psychoanalytic model), but of illuminating and exploring. We acknowledge not just that the repetition compulsion is happening, but that we are a part of it. We note our role in it, we think not about its creation, but it’s cocreation. Maybe we state this in a direct and obvious way. Maybe it takes the shape of metaphor. Perhaps the interpretation is little more than a gesture.
At times it may seem that we stumble upon how it is happening in other facets of the client’s life, though does not seem to be coming into the therapy, without realizing that it’s not happening is the way it is happening within the therapy. Maybe the countertransferential response of the therapist is inhibiting its expression. Maybe there is something about the exact way in which the transference is manifesting that is causing it to transform into something else. It could be that it’s just waiting for the opportune moment, the appropriate rupture, what Paul Russell called “the crunch”.
Those not inclined to want to take up the idea of the repetition compulsion as a possibility might find this sentiment frustrating. “So we’re operating within a set of criteria where when the phenomenon is there, it is there, and when the phenomenon is not there, it is still there?” To which my only current answer is yes. To work with the repetition compulsion does require some presupposition of its validity, but for anyone who has endeavored to spend any real amount of time in contemplation of it will likely be able to discern its functioning in multiple facets of their own life. But it is, at is foundation, a purely phenomenal property, and one that, beyond its observation, cannot necessarily be otherwise operationalized or measured.
However, I would posit, who of us who has engaged in the process of therapy, or spent time in serious contemplation of our own lives, has not come into some kind of awareness of a pattern? Of something that seems like it plays itself over and over again? Of a nagging familiarity about something we could have insisted was supposed to be brand new? Maybe you find yourself consistently dating people who remind you of a specific parent or caretaker? Maybe you constantly find yourself overcompensating in social situations? Perhaps it seems you are always the last to know when a member of your inner circle is frustrated/sad/annoyed/stressed/suffering? It would be easy to say, well let’s just stop doing that. But the problem is the pattern serves multiple masters. I said earlier that the point is not to satisfy or frustrate. That is largely because to fall on one side or the other of that dialectic is to fail to acknowledge that the repetition compulsion already satisfies and frustrates. Its persistence is a consequence of its needing to satiate the appetites of both positions.
I referenced the analyst Paul Russell earlier. Russell did not publish much. Nevertheless, he seems to have had a significant influence on the psychotherapeutic community in the greater Boston area, and I’ve had the pleasure to be exposed to some of his ideas from those who had the opportunity to work with him and see him lecture. I’m going to paraphrase as I don’t recall exactly what paper the idea appears in, but one facet of his work that has stuck with me is the idea that the repetition compulsion is only solvable in as much as one is able to come to the realization that there is no solution. This is not as bleak as it sounds. But it is paradoxical. One must surrender to what one is destined to repeat. That surrendering, however, is not a passive submission but a taking over. In recognizing one’s repetition, one obtains the power to do something, not about, but with it. We get to live it in new ways. To relish in its more confounding and disorienting components. We are given the gift of depathologizing that which feels most crazy-making to us. We learn that it could not have been any other way, while also discovering it must be that it gets to be some other kind of way, experiencing the full richness of that paradoxical position.
It's why as therapists we elevate words like “holding”, “containing”, “negotiation”. Why it’s important for us not to rush in and to learn to tolerate our own reticence. It’s why we hold an air of caution around our client’s so-called successes, because we know in finding that success something had to be let go of, grieved, and very likely betrayed. Within that betrayal the client is likely to feel the full force of the dangers that were being held at bay. They will, to the core of their being, be confronted by that which the repetition compulsion was meant to ward off or protect against. It sounds dramatic because it is.
And sometimes when the client notes the sense of repetition in what they are doing, we may find ourselves talking about it, or they might not even pause and tarry on towards whatever point they were hoping to get to, or perhaps we will find ourselves sitting in reverence of that fact. Within all of these, the repetition, or more accurately our repetition, persists. And hopefully, if we are doing what we must, we will be able to see it, to catch site of it in the winter of our work, and look lovingly at everything it contains.
