This article discusses the question of repetition in Freudian theory. Beginning with pre-psychoanalytic texts, we go back to the concept of the experience of pain, which confronts us with the problem of the repetition of displeasure. Pain appears as a failure of protective mechanisms of the neuronal apparatus and indicates the existence of a process that, despite involving displeasure, continues to be repeated. The process also provides indications of the concept that, twenty years later, Freud called compulsion to repetition.
Experience of pain; repetition; temporality; memory