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INTRODUCTION
Several theorists have commented on the repetitious nature of behavior, such as Freud (1914a) who proposed that a propensity to repeat past experiences is a fundamental human characteristic. Bibring (1943) indicated that repetition is a tendency of life, including psychological processes. Schur (1966) went one step further expressing that repetitiveness is a ubiquitous phenomenon transmitted in every living organism by the genetic code. Inderbitzin and Levy (1998) suggest that the question is not why we repeat but what stops us from repeating. Repetitious behavior can include thoughts, images, flashbacks, dreams, emotions, somatic sensations, and behavioral re-enactments.
Within a psychotherapy context repetitive maladaptive behavior is extremely prevalent, and arguably the main reason people seek psychotherapy. Maladaptive refers to physical, psychological and somatic behavior that favors negative outcomes in terms of resource standing, relationships, functioning, or emotional states. Freud (1914a) described how patients would repeat neurotic conflicts during analysis rather than remember the traumatic origins. Later in "Beyond The Pleasure Principle" (1920, p. 18) Freud expressed "He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past." Feelings that cannot be remembered or expressed in words will be manifested in actions. Freud applied the term repetition compulsion to this phenomenon.
Freud (1920, 1926) believed that repetition of traumatic experiences in dreams, behavior, and fate neurosis are in the service of mastery rather than the pleasure principle. Psychoanalysts typically emphasize a mastery aspect to traumatic re-experiencing and wish fulfillment to non-traumatic. Bibring (1943) believed that the repetition of traumatic experiences leads to mastery, at least partly because of the restorative tendencies of the ego. Janet (1925) indicated that there is a need to relive a traumatic event to master it. Horowitz (1976) suggested that a traumatic event is repeated to align the traumatic experience and a person's view of it, a so-called completion tendency. Cohen (1980) explained that repetition occurs because the ego has not organized the conflict or wish. The repetition proceeds so that the unconscious trauma can be retrospectively mastered. Loewald (1971) indicated that the compulsion to repeat unconscious conflicts, wishes and experiences passively is primarily because of their having remained under repression and not exposed to...