Failed Resolutions and Broken Promises

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It’s been a little over a month since the new year, so we’re rapidly approaching when our New Year’s resolutions go to hell. We start pretending that we never committed to drinking less and exercising more, never swore off social media and caffeine, never insisted that we’d learn a second language, teach ourselves how to play piano, make more time for prayer or meditation, embark upon a self-directed study of the culinary arts, or be more attentive to those around us.

In another week (perhaps sooner), we’ll slouch back into old habits without feigning acknowledgment that we once resolved to be different. We’ll do what we always do, repeating the same errors and vices that lead time and again to heartache and misery, lending further credence to the immortal quip: “Those who promise to change ought to change their promises.”

But why do we struggle to avoid what we know from experience will cause us harm? Why can’t we ever seem to break free from the grip of the past, the mistakes we’ve made but fail to learn from?

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud reflects on his time treating soldiers returning home from World War I. The symptoms of their “war neuroses,” as he termed it—today, such patients would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—often manifested as traumatic dreams, nightmares in which sufferers returned again and again to the scene of the trauma, experiencing the sudden explosion or unexpected ambush afresh, as if for the first time.

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What is interesting about such symptoms, Freud says, is that—whereas he had previously interpreted dreams as a means of wish fulfillment, an unconscious attempt to obtain in sleep what one secretly desires but cannot have in waking life—traumatic dreams bring “the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.”

Why, Freud wonders, would one wish to return to the moment of rupture? What is going on in one’s mental life that reliving a frightening, overwhelming shock becomes desirable?

One remarkable thing about Freud’s work is his ability to take the symptomatology of atypical sufferers and use it to demonstrate universal human characteristics. It should come as no surprise, then, that his reflections on war trauma lead to an investigation of more common and seemingly more banal human behavior—behavior which he nevertheless sees as resembling his patients’ compulsive return to their traumatic experiences.

The man who is fired from job after job for continuously showing up late, the woman who ends up in the same kind of failed relationship again and again, the students who fall behind every semester no matter how many times they resolve to stay on top of their work, the person who is notorious for misplacing keys or forgetting to close the garage, each of us failing year after year to keep our New Year’s resolutions—examples of the repetitive nature of humanity’s self-defeating behavior abounds.

Sigmund Freud

Source: Max Halberstadt (1882–1940) / Wikipedia / Public Domain

Freud attempts to account for this phenomenon by theorizing that human beings are subject to what he calls a “compulsion to repeat.” Instead of learning from past experiences and changing our habits and choices to achieve better outcomes, we repeat —“under the pressure of a compulsion”—the same destructive behavior over and over, provoking (unsurprisingly) the same results.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he attributes this repetition compulsion to humanity’s deep-seated desire for destruction, our perverse (and unconscious) longing to return to the dust from which we were made. The “compulsion to repeat,” he says, is a continuous attempt to facilitate that goal, one which undermines our conscious choices, minimizes the role of human agency, and condemns us to a life of tragic repetitions.

And yet, Freud’s views are more complicated than this. Elsewhere, for instance, in his 1914 article Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through, he suggests that our self-defeating repetitions are manifestations of traumatic memories that we have repressed and have thus become unable to work through. “The patient,” he writes, “repeats instead of remembering.”

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But what would happen if one did remember? What would be the result if the destructive repetition was approached, examined, talked about, and accepted as the product of a painful memory one has not wanted to acknowledge as one’s own?

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The sufferer, Freud writes, “must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived.”

The latter half of that final sentence is vital, especially for those who continue to bump up against our failures, resistances, and painful repetitions.

Our future, it suggests, is rooted in our past, but it need not be dictated by it. Overcoming our self-destructive tendencies will not be easy. Despite our sincere attempts to change, we will continue to repeat the same mistakes and struggle to alter unwanted behaviors. But we can break the cycle with courage, resolve, and willingness to admit the parts of our personalities that cause us the greatest pain. And remembering that is a resolution worth keeping.