It is confusing to contemplate what motivates someone like Halle Berry to repeatedly select an abusive, philandering husband despite her conscious intention to select someone trustworthy. It raises one of the most important questions that can be asked about human nature — why do we hurt ourselves? And why do we do so repeatedly as if on automatic pilot? Furthermore, why are relationships (particularly marriage) simultaneously damaging and an opportunity to heal. Something negative about our spouse attracted us to them in ways that we were not consciously processing during courtship, and it is within our negative experiences of them that we have the opportunity to heal from our original (unmetabolized) wounds.
Freud defined the repetition compulsion as the repeated pattern of self-harm that is motivated by an unconscious force (something he termed “the death instinct”). He apparently conceived of the notion during sessions with a female child he was treating who had been abandoned by her mother. He was fascinated to witness the child re-enact the “scene” of her mother’s abandonment by repeatedly throwing a doll over the couch and saying goodbye to it. She enacted this scene over and over again in front of him without conscious awareness that she represented the abandoned child.
Freud recognized at the time that he was witnessing an aspect of human nature fundamental to who we are. Namely, that when we are traumatized (which we are all to varying degrees) and we are unable to grieve our suffering, that our disconnected awareness of the original trauma leads to an impulse to recreate the feelings and mind state of the original trauma. The way that we “remember” lies within understanding who we attract into our lives, and in particular the way we shape our perceptions of how others treat us. From an unconscious point of view, we recreate our original pain as if we are the amnesic director of a play about our early lives. The oddity is that we are the only ones participating in the play who have lost the script!
Therapy offers the patient the opportunity to examine the gap between the early pain of life that was too unbearable to process or understand and the stories we tell ourselves as adults about the repeated ways in which we are harmed by others. Most patients realize through this process that the theme of the stories they tell have an eerie mirroring quality, as if they have simply switched pronouns in each retelling of painful experiences from the past and present.
Does this mean that Halle Berry “caused” her own pain? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that she very deliberately picked men in her life (unconsciously) who were most likely to act-out in her marriage in ways that repeated early childhood abuse that she suffered from her father. And yes in the sense that she may have even provoked rage and anger in these men. However, mostly no in the sense that since her early abuse was unthinkable and unbearable, she didn’t know that she was the doll being thrown! She picked them without knowing why she was drawn to a personality style that was likely to recreate such painful feelings for her.
This brings us to the most important question: Why do we behave in self-destructive ways? Why don’t we simply say to ourselves “I will pick someone unlike my father, etc. who will treat me with respect, and kindness”. Freud was puzzled by this question. He termed the phrase “the death instinct” to describe our self-destructive tendencies and he thought that there was a force in human nature as strong as the life instinct working in opposition to those things that are good for us. This concept still exists in analytic circles (in particular with therapists from the object/relations camp) as a viable explanation. However, it falls a bit short in understanding why we engage in such irrational behavior. In my opinion, the death instinct explanation is the equivalent to saying that “evil” exists without explaining why it exists.
The preferred explanation described by Existential Psychotherapists is that the motivatation to re-enact early painful experiences is simply the fact that we are built to complete our original grieving. In other words, we cause ourselves new (mirroring) pain so that we can bring our early pain out of an unconscious state into conscious grieving that ultimately completes the arrested healing process, increasing our wholeness and our authenticity.
