The concept of the repetition compulsion is at the core of the three principal lynchpins of the process of
psychoanalysis and distinguish it from other forms of psychotherapy: transference, resistance and acting
out. In psychoanalysis the analysis of the transference is the major tool for making the patient’s
unconscious become conscious. The patient transfers his unconscious attitudes from childhood, which
he does not remember, onto the analyst. He then experiences the analyst as if he is his father or mother
or significant other from childhood and regresses to experience what it was like to interact with that
person.
