Why Do We Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes? The Compulsion to Repeat in Psychoanalysis

There are certain cycles in our lives: poor choices, recurring relationships, situations in which we find ourselves always at the same point… Why can’t we break free from these cycles? Psychoanalysis offers an answer to this phenomenon: the compulsion to repeat.

In his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud argues that people often have a tendency to reenact traumatic or painful experiences. Moreover, these repetitions frequently occur without conscious awareness. In other words, the individual unconsciously recreates a situation that once caused them harm.

Freud explains this as an impulse “beyond the pleasure principle.” That is, human beings do not act solely in pursuit of pleasure; sometimes they are driven to relive pain in an attempt to “master” or “make sense of” it.

Freud illustrates this concept with examples such as war veterans reliving their trauma, children transforming unpleasant events into play, or patients in therapy repeatedly reproducing the same emotional states. What all these examples have in common is the recurrence of the past in the present.

These repetitions can sometimes offer an opportunity for healing. Yet more often, the individual remains trapped in the same painful cycle.

Psychoanalyst Ishak Saygılı views the compulsion to repeat not only as an individual phenomenon but also as a social and political cycle. According to him, societies too reenact their traumas: through the resurgence of oppressive regimes, cultures of violence, or the reproduction of discrimination. Just as in the individual, beneath these repetitions lies a kind of pleasureless pleasure—meaning that even destruction can produce a form of satisfaction.

This perspective transforms psychoanalysis into a powerful tool for analyzing not only personal issues but also cultural and historical processes.

In psychoanalytic therapy, these repetitions typically emerge through transference. The patient projects past significant relationships onto the therapist and begins to relive those dynamics. When properly recognized, this process can help the individual free themselves from repeating the same patterns.

Thus, confronting the ghosts of the past may sometimes be the first step toward liberating oneself from them in the present.

The compulsion to repeat is a phenomenon that appears, to varying degrees, in everyone’s life—sometimes as a pattern of relationships, sometimes as a mode of thinking, sometimes as a habit. Psychoanalysis offers a powerful lens to help us understand and analyze these cycles.

Perhaps the most important question is this: Is what you are experiencing a choice—or a repetition?