Repetition Compulsion: from: "Project for a Psychology" to "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"

Abstract

It has been frequently asserted that main metapsychological thesis are already antecipated in Freud's manuscript "Project for a psychology” (1895), but the meaning and the reach of this fact is not always fully expressed, neither how literal is Freud's use of someof his early concepts, even in the moments of greatest innovation in subsequent theorizations. This work addresses a very specific point this discussion, restricted to the concept of "repetition compulsion" introduced in "Beyond the pleasure principle" (1920), in order to contribute in the wider question of the genesis of the fundamental metapsychological concepts.