Why Do We Choose Things That Harm Us And Repeat Those Things That Harm Us?
That which insists and repeats itself in our behaviors, our ways of thinking and in our choices, has always been something that questions us deeply as people and psychologists but even more so, when what insists is something that we would like to get rid of and despite our varied and multiple attempts we do not succeed and we find ourselves with the same thing over and over again.
That which has an air of fatalistic destiny in psychology and psychoanalysis is called repetition and constitutes a fundamental tool to know the depths of each being and guide the direction of the patient’s cure.
In this article I would like to talk about repetition and develop certain questions that revolve around it; What is it repeating? Why do we repeat what we repeat if many times it is something that hurts us? Why does repetition have such a compulsive nature? and how can we get out of that place?
Philosophers such as Plato, Nietzche and Kierkegard spoke about repetition before it was a topic addressed from psychology but it was not until Freud that it began to be taken as a serious question in analysis, since it affected the therapeutic process, the patient-therapist dynamic and the choices and general life of the subject.
After Freud, many authors have continued to develop research on the matter and even with that, new questions are always opened. This is because what is repeated constitutes a central axis of what must be worked on in analysis and one of the greatest sufferings of each person.
Many times our choices not only do not give us pleasure, but they take us to a place quite far from what is pleasurable which appears to us as a complete mystery, since, if we think about it, we could assume that as thinking beings we would tend to choose what is best for us and do what is good for us, but in reality this does not always happen like this and more Well, more and more frequently we see how ourselves and the people around us are prisoners of choices that harm us but we cannot change no matter how hard we try and how many times something that hurts us insists and repeats itself.
“In the soul there is a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but certain other forces or constellations that oppose it, so that the final result cannot always correspond to a tendency to pleasure” ~ Freud.
Freud discovers that there is something that goes beyond the search for pleasure within all of us but it also recognizes that, if we repeat something unpleasant, it is only because that repetition is connected to a gain of another kind.
There are many opposing forces and constellations within ourselves, some opposing each other, such as, for example; that something that generates pain and also generates pleasure, that what we want is not what suits us or that we do not really want what we want for ourselves. Analysis, in that sense, becomes a fundamental place to address all these questions and dilemmas of being and make an attempt to resolve them or for the person to learn how to deal with them better, but let’s understand where they arise from…
Enjoyment is one of the things that often comes into play in repetition Enjoying or longing for what is not convenient, a suffering that has a hidden pleasure that is difficult for us to get rid of because there is precisely a pleasure at play that catches us. But repetition is not only that, Freud understood it as a special way of remembering that arose in those instances in which the person did not remember anything that was forgotten or repressed and then lived it again and reproduced it no longer as a memory, but as a act, where it is repeated, without knowing that it is repeated, behaviors, ways of being, ways of acting towards others, ways of giving responses, ways of being in a relationship, inhibitions and pathological traits of our character.
“Destiny is the particular way by which the signifiers of the subject have taken hold of those chances to interweave them in repetition” ~ Lacan
That “destiny” that repeats itself to us over and over again is what Freud called repetition compulsion, but in reality more than a destiny it has to do with the appearance of something that is part of what is most typical of our unconscious Repetition as Freud understood it is repetition of trauma and in that repetition there is something that goes beyond the pleasure principle, because the traumatic in itself is not pleasurable, so the gain appears in the compulsiveness that is an attempt to make something appear that It always escapes.
But well, a symptomatic repetition of a behavior or a choice can awaken in us the desire to want to know what it is about, in our particular case, why we continue doing what we don’t want to do or what keeps us tied and that is the reason why many patients come to consultation.
But here we must highlight the difference from case to case, and the non-existence of general rules, each person repeats something that has to do with the deepest part of themselves. Analytical therapy is an invitation to open those questions that can bring us closer to a hint of answers that will help us stop repetition and to understand what was at stake in it and then, once understanding that, to be able to change the course of our destiny, but this time taking the helm.
