Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (III)

While Freud does not define “resistance” in this piece, his use of the term is congruent with the descriptions offered in other places. In “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), for instance, Freud remarks that “anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance” (162). Repetition constitutes “resistance,” then, inasmuch as it replaces — and thus effectively preempts — the “work” proper to analysis. This work consists in the struggle to disarm repressions and liberate, or consciously access, that which has been repressed: impulses, affects, thoughts, fantasies, and, of course, memories.

Consider, too, Freud’s abstract on the aim of analysis, as it is found in the “Constructions” (1937) essay written towards the end of his life:

“[T]he work of analysis aims at inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition. With this purpose in view he must be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the consequences of repressions of this kind: thus that they are a substitute for these things that he has forgotten.” (257-258)

Thus releasing repressions and repairing memory are conceived as corollaries. If, Freud now seems to be saying, this repressed content, including memories, can be “discharged” in behaviors that schematically replicate the original experience, there will be no felt need to “liberate” that content as a conscious memory. In this way, the patient unburdens himself of the content in a way that favors resistance. So long as a repressed content, pressing for discharge, can be disposed of via action, there is little appeal in handling it by the comparatively painful approach of recollection. Indeed, the patient has considerable incentive to avoid the second alternative, if at all possible, since — negative consequences of “acting out” notwithstanding — repetition comes rather easily.

Under conditions of resistance — particularly, a transference that is “hostile or unduly intense” (151) — the analyst can expect a “sequence” of repetitions from the patient that are best regarded as potent “weapons”:

“From then onwards the resistances determine the sequence of the material which is to be repeated. The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment — weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” (151)

Thus, in the case of the psychoanalytic “criteria” mentioned in the last entry — transference and resistance — repetition approaches a relation of pure identity. Repetition is a type of transference (and vice versa); just as it is a type of resistance. And these relations of identity, while threatening to collapse the distinctions between separate concepts, are nonetheless unsurprising. In most places, after all, Freud is plainly interested in transference itself almost entirely as a form of resistance, while resistance hardly threatens treatment until it blossoms into its most acute form — namely, transference. Once repetition is turned into a near-synonym for transference, in other words, it seems likewise inevitable that it would interest Freud exclusively under its aspect of “resistance.”

How exactly, though, does repetition constitute resistance? — how, that is, does it interfere with the course of treatment? Freud reiterates that “the patient repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance” (151). In short, the patient does not do what he ought — he does not remember directly. And he does do what he ought not — he succumbs to a repetition compulsion that both precludes directly recollection and, in the bargain, disrupts the analysis in other ways.

To this provisional summary, and in light of our foregoing reflections, I feel tempted to append a couple qualifications. First, as I have insisted, the patient not only repeats instead of remembering; he also repeats as a way of remembering — the only way as yet available to him. Second, while the neurotic’s repetition compulsion is, according to Freud’s account, plainly inflamed “under the conditions of resistance,” this compulsion has surely antedated the analysis-proper.

To be sure, “acting out” as a surrogate for direct recollection may well belong — strictly speaking — to the clinical context. But it would be an overstatement, it seems, to infer that repetitious phenomena originate there. Nor would Freud dispute this: for what is neurosis, from the isolated symptom to the all-pervasive character pathology, if not just such a repetition? Here one might respond that these repetitions, while antedating the analysis, are even then redolent of “resistance” — resistant, that is, to consciously approaching the repressed materials for which they substitute.  And this seems correct, provided we broaden the category the resistance beyond its “narrow” application to behaviors that interfere with analysis, and paradigmatically to whatever checks or diverts the flow of free associations.

In fact, I take the next sentences in Freud’s piece as strong evidence that he, too, is expanding the meaning of both “repeating” and “resistance” beyond the treatment, to wherever repressions much be secured against illumination.

“We may now ask what it is that he in fact repeats or acts out. The answer is that he repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality — his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character-traits. He also repeats all his symptoms in the course of the treatment.” (151)

For what, indeed, could it mean for the patient to “repeat” — in treatment — his “inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes,” his “pathological character-traits,” as well as “all his symptoms” (151)? After all: on Freud’s own view, isn’t each of these items already and in essence a “repetition” of some unconscious memory? — something, in Freud’s phrase, that “has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality”? In other words, can’t we simply say that the patient’s “acting out” is the repetition — in therapy — of a repetition — those pieces of the manifest personality that already do double-duty for a repressed memory? Freud continues:

“[T]he patient's state of being ill cannot cease with the beginning of his analysis, and…we must treat his illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force. This state of illness is brought, piece by piece, within the field and range of operation of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something real and contemporary, we have to do our therapeutic work on it, which consists in a large measure in tracing it back to the past.” (151-152)

The formulations enclosing this passage are, again, paradoxical. Freud begins the quote with an exhortation to “treat his [the patient’s] illness…as a present-day force,” and not as something over and done, “an event of the past.” Yet the very next sentence seems to contain a roughly antithetical idea: that, while the “patient experiences it [the illness] as something real and contemporary,” nonetheless, in “our therapeutic work” we should not be misled by this putative contemporaneity. On the contrary, we must insist on “tracing it back to the past.” If, then, Freud invites the analyst to construe the illness “as a present-day force,” it is because for the patient that is exactly how it appears — “real and contemporary.” The illness persists as a “reality,” then; but this reality is a function of the patient’s (unconscious) illusion. The patient’s “illusion of reality” becomes, for Freud, the “reality of an illusion.”