Repetition compulsion stands as one of the most contested and generative concepts in the depth-psychological tradition, marking the point at which Freud’s clinical optimism confronted an apparently irreducible self-destructive tendency in human beings. Freud first framed the phenomenon as an attempt at mastery—the ego’s effort to actively redo what was passively suffered—before its daemonic intractability drove him toward the death instinct hypothesis. This move proved decisive for subsequent debate: most post-Freudian theorists, including Janet before him, retained the mastery hypothesis while rejecting Thanatos, reading the compulsion as an ‘unsuccessful attempt at healing.’ Kalsched, working at the Jungian–trauma interface, situates repetition compulsion within an archetypal self-care system that, though originally protective, becomes diabolically self-perpetuating. Conforti radicalizes the picture further by relocating the drive to repeat within morphogenetic field theory and Jungian archetypal patterning, arguing that replication is not merely defensive but informationally coded into the organism’s developmental trajectory. Hillman, characteristically, reframes compulsive repetition as fidelity to mythic form—the iteratio of alchemy—thereby rescuing it from purely pathological status. Herman and Levine attend to its phenomenology in trauma survivors, stressing re-enactment’s driven, tenacious quality. Lanius situates it within the neurodevelopmental sequelae of early abuse. Together these voices reveal compulsion repetition as a nexus where instinct theory, archetypal psychology, trauma science, and questions of therapeutic possibility converge and productively quarrel.