Creative repetition

Freud understood repetition, on the one hand, as something 'daemonic' and conservative that could compulsively drive us back, as in the cases of traumatic neurosis or what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet, on the other hand, he also grasped the pleasure of repetition such as that found in children's jokes, rhymes, and stories or in his grandson's invented game of Fort/Da through which the child achieves mastery of his experience of his mother's leaving and grows as an individual. Using a process-oriented approach, this paper explores this latter form of repetition and the possibility of different outcomes for the resolution of repetition other than symbolic thought. It describes a clinical case of an unfolding process of unconscious intersubjective negotiation where early conservative repetition yields to a creative repetition that carries the potential for progress and the production of new forms. Here the patient shifts from using her analyst as an object of repetition to an object of play. Rather than approach repetition as a difficulty to be transcended, the author argues that repetition is the vehicle of its own transcendence.