Repetition Compulsion

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This "re-living" can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucination. The term can also be used to cover the repetition of behaviour or life patterns more broadly: a 'key component in Freud's understanding of mental life, "repetition compulsion..".describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life'.