The Cycle of Repetition in Unconscious Fantasy and a Person’s Life
Have you ever found yourself saying, “Why does this keep happening to me?” Whether it’s in relationships, work, or the way we respond to stress, many people notice recurring experiences that feel familiar, or even frustrating. These repetitions are rarely accidental. They are often expressions of an unconscious logic / language that long term psychoanalytic therapy can help bring to light in our therapeutic work together. If you’re seeking psychotherapy in Melbourne, these patterns may be the first step in discovering something deeper.
In psychoanalysis, we do not view these moments as mere “bad habits” or “patterns” in the behavioral sense. Rather, they are symptomatic, linked to something deeper in the person’s relationship to desire, language, and early experiences.
Why Do We Repeat Certain Experiences? Because Speaking Beings Use Language To Relate
“Repetition” is not simply doing the same thing again and again. It reflects something of the person’s position in relation to the Other – such as a return to an unresolved question, a trace of something that couldn’t be made sense of or processed, at the time it was first encountered in one’s life.
Sigmund Freud, a neurologist and the founder of talk therapy who discovered the Unconscious, first formulated the concept of the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) in his 1920 paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920), where he observed that patients often re-enact distressing experiences in their lives, rather than simply recalling them. This phenomenon, he argued, pointed to something in the psyche that exceeds the pleasure principle – some energy in excess – a drive to repeat that is not oriented toward mastery, or pleasure but toward something more enigmatic and unarticulated.
Freud’s early therapeutic work with women (particularly in 1895), co-authored with Josef Breuer, revealed the value of listening to unconscious material as it emerged through speech, slips of tongue, dreams, and bodily symptoms. At a time when women’s voices in Austria were largely marginalised, especially with the rise of fascism in Europe, Freud’s radical intervention was to listen: to allow women to speak freely in the context of talk therapy. He proposed that speech, especially when expressed through free association, could symbolise latent content and bring to light the unconscious tensions and conflicts underlying the person’s suffering.
Building on Freud’s discoveries and many decades of psychoanalytic peer reviewed literature by him and his students, Jacques Lacan reinterpreted the unconscious as “structured like a language” with its own logic independent of ego (Écrits, 1966), shifting the emphasis from repressed content to the symbolic operations through which subjectivity is formed. For Lacan, repetition is not simply behavioural but emerges from the subject’s encounter with jouissance. This is a paradoxical enjoyment that pushes beyond the limits of pleasure and may result in problematic situations in the person’s life, causing suffering. Repetition, in this light, is about the insistence of the unconscious and the enduring mark of desire.
How Psychoanalytic Therapy May Highlight Repetition
Rather than offering strategies for “changing behaviour,” psychoanalysis is an invitation to speak freely in the session – in sessions together you are always one to choose the topics you bring – and we work on them together – to bring forth words, associations, and images that emerge from the unconscious. Through this process, what was once vague or opaque begins to take form on the metaphorical stage. It may be constructed, deconstructed, elaborated, deciphered, or clarified within the therapeutic encounter.
Repetition is not addressed through advice or solutions, but worked through dialectically by speaking, listening, and analysing. Some of the questions I may be pondering when I listen to you (based in my own analytical clinical training and over a decade of analysis and supervision), include:
- What fantasy might be organising this repeated scene, event, or experience in your life?
- What – or whose – desire is at stake here?
- What position does the subject of unconscious take within this scenario of desire?
Analytical listening allows the person in therapy to begin distancing themselves from the compulsion to repeat, a concept introduced by Freud in his Papers on Technique (1914-1917). This shift does not occur through the conscious efforts of the ego, but rather through the process of working through these repetitions with a Lacanian psychoanalyst. This movement unfolds as the person speaks, reflects, and gradually articulates more about their experience in collaboration with the analyst. The process can be joyful and surprising, yet at times challenging, as it involves speaking about painful or unresolved experiences, which may bring sadness at times becoming aware of certain aspects of one’s self, a part of the process of talk therapy. This work unfolds differently for each one. Over time, through each session, one may come to understand aspects of their internal division, manifested in contradictory thoughts, positions, or unconscious choices. What was once unclear may begin to reveal itself through this ongoing work of dialogue.
Breaking the Cycle by Working Together in Therapy – Listening to the Unconscious
1. Make Space for Speech – Psychoanalytic sessions offer a space where the person can talk without being told what to think or directed, or interpreted too quickly. It is in speaking that one hears oneself differently over the sessions.
2. Notice Recurrences – What returns again and again in different forms? Who do you always seem to become in your own words?
3. Approaching Fantasy – What scenario seems to shape the emotional tone of your life? What “role” do you always end up playing?
4. Tolerate Ambiguity – Change in psychoanalysis does not come from clarity but from a different relation to ambiguity, desire, and not-knowing.
5. Work Through (Durcharbeiten) – Repetition does not end overnight. It is worked through, over time, as the subject confronts the unconscious material that structures their enjoyment / suffering in life.
Moments of Realisation in the Analytic Encounter (Generalised Examples)
- A professional repeatedly finds themselves feeling undervalued at work. Through therapy, they begin to recognise how early experiences with a distant caregiver may have shaped their unconscious expectations around approval and recognition, a tendency to pursue what remains out of reach.
- An individual describes a series of relationships that “end the same way.” In analysis, they begin to reflect on an underlying fear of being perceived as vulnerable, which leads them to withdraw from intimacy before it challenges their sense of self.
- Someone who feels “stuck” begins to speak about their role within the family, where expressing themselves carried emotional cost. What once appeared as depression gradually emerges in speech as a compromise formation, stemming from guilt, unconscious conflict, and past trauma.
Conclusion – A New Relationship to the Repetition
In psychoanalysis, we do not seek to remove or erase the past, but to develop a new relationship to it — a different perspective — through speaking, listening, and saying more within the therapeutic encounter. By uncovering the unconscious logic underlying repetition, one may no longer feel entirely at the mercy of what returns, or so alienated from it. But this shift is not immediate; it unfolds slowly, through the joint work of what emerges in therapy.
This kind of conversation is not pre-determined. As an analytic therapist, I do not know what you will say, and my response only comes after I have listened carefully. What I say depends on what and how you speak – on the unconscious formations you bring (i.e., topics, dreams, day to day events in your life that were challenging somehow etc.,), which may become clearer from session to session, and over many sessions. This is why holding the frame consistently matters.
A shift becomes possible – not through willpower or strategies – but through time, through speech, and through a kind of listening that allows something new to be heard.
If you’re seeking psychotherapy in Melbourne and wish to move beyond surface solutions, psychoanalysis offers a space for serious commitment to one’s desire – a long-term commitment that unfolds uniquely within each therapeutic encounter. Not by fixing you, but by working together, so that you might begin to hear yourself differently.
If you are curious about psychoanalytic therapy, you are welcome to visit the Bita Psychology booking page.