In order to render more comprehensible this ‘repetition-compulsion’ which appears in the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics, we must above all get entirely rid of the erroneous idea that in this struggle with resistances we are concerned with any resistance on the part of the unconscious. The unconscious, i. e. the ‘repressed’ material, offers no resistance whatever to the curative efforts; indeed it has no other aim than to force its way through the pressure weighing on it, either to consciousness or to discharge by means of some real action. The resistance in the treatment proceeds from the same higher levels and systems in the psychic life that in their time brought about the repression. But since the motives of the resistances, and indeed the resistances themselves, are found in the process of the treatment to be unconscious, we are well advised to amend an inadequacy in our mode of expression. We escape ambiguity if we contrast not the conscious and the unconscious, but the coherent ego and the repressed. Much in the ego is certainly unconscious itself, just what may be called the kernel of the ego; only a part of it comes under the category of preconscious. After thus replacing a purely descriptive method of expression by a systematic or dynamic one, we may say that the resistance on the part of the analysed person proceeds from his ego, and then we at once see that the ‘repetition-compulsion’ must be ascribed to the repressed element in the unconscious. It probably could not find expression till the work of the treatment coming to meet it had loosened the repression. There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and preconscious ego subserves the pleasure-principle; it is trying to avoid the ‘pain’ that would be aroused by the release of the repressed material, and our efforts are directed to effecting an entry for such painful feeling by an appeal to the reality-principle. In what relation to the pleasure-principle then does the repetition-compulsion stand, that which expresses the force of what is repressed? It is plain that most of what is revived by the repetition-compulsion cannot but bring discomfort to the ego, for it promotes the bringing to light of the activities of repressed impulses; but that is a discomfort we have already taken into account and without subversion of the pleasure-principle, since it is ‘pain’ in respect of one system and at the same time satisfaction for the other. The new and remarkable fact, however, that we have now to describe is that the repetition-compulsion also revives experiences of the past that contain no potentiality of pleasure, and which could at no time have been satisfactions, even of impulses since repressed.