Why do I keep repeating the same mistakes?
The question usually comes after the third time. The same kind of partner, the same quarrel with a manager, the same promise to oneself broken in the same week of the month. The person already knows the pattern. Knowing it has not changed it.
Most answers to this question talk about habits, reward circuits or old wounds. They explain where the loop comes from. They rarely ask what the person is looking for inside it.
In 1843 Søren Kierkegaard wrote a short, odd book about exactly this word. It is called Repetition, and he published it under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius.
Two movements in one
The book opens with the narrator deciding to test a question on himself. Is repetition possible at all? He once had a good stay in Berlin, so he goes back to find out whether the same thing can happen twice. Early in the first part he sets out the idea the whole book turns on:
"Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions"
— Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, in Fear and Trembling; Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard's Writings VI (Princeton University Press, 1983), part one, p. 131
The sentence goes on to say which directions he means. What is recollected has already been, and it is repeated backward. Genuine repetition, in his phrase, is recollected forward.
Both movements come back to something already known. What differs is the way the person is facing.
Looking backward
Recollection, in this book, is a way of living in the past tense. Kierkegaard compares it to a beautiful garment one has outgrown. It may be lovely, but it no longer fits.
Read this way, a repeated mistake can be a kind of recollection. The third partner is chosen because something about the first one is still wanted back: a feeling, a version of oneself, a chance to make an old scene end differently. The person is not really choosing the present situation. They are trying to get into a past one.
That attempt is bound to disappoint. The past cannot be entered again, and each new round shows it once more.
Looking forward
Repetition in Kierkegaard's sense is something else. It is taking up the same thing again while facing forward, and choosing it knowingly. In the same pages he says that hoping and recollecting come easily to the young, while willing repetition asks for courage.
This is not a call to break every pattern. Kierkegaard calls repetition daily bread. Much of a life consists of the same things chosen again: the same work, the same people, the same morning. Choosing them again is not a mistake. The trouble starts when the choice is only a way of going back.
The young man in the book
The second strand of the book shows how hard the difference is to live. Constantin befriends a young man who falls in love. A few days later the young man is already recollecting his love, as if it were over. He wants the girl and cannot be with her. He waits for something outside him, a kind of thunderstorm, to set things right.
Kierkegaard does not settle whether the young man ever reaches repetition. He leaves the reader with the gap between waiting for the past to return and choosing something again.
A question to take away
Existential therapy took from Kierkegaard the habit of asking about the direction of a choice, not only its cause. The same idea stands behind the page on the dizziness of freedom, and behind Yalom's account of how people avoid responsibility for their choices.
The book leaves one question. What am I really trying to get back when I choose the same thing for the third time?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.