We don’t know what we are encountering in someone we encounter. Is it a first meeting, or a reunion ? The encounter may involve chance, a coincidence. It may be a challenge for the gambler looking for an encounter at the very limit of his destiny.
For Freud, every meeting is a reunion. Whether it take place in the expectation of belief or that of the transference, it is always a re-encounter with an object, a lost Other. Repetition compulsion drives each person to find again the maternal in order to restore lost happiness and escape from disarray and the “ uncanny ”.
With the analytic treatment, the compulsion to repeat is above all a refusal to recollect, that is to untangle the past from the scene of present reality. The analyst is not there in propria persona : his role is to enable an encounter with the past, in order to send the past back to the past and be able to live the present.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 201-219.