Sweeney's Freudian Compulsion

Ritual, repetition, and transitional objects in Sweeney Todd | Plus, a "British and loyal" crossword and more from our conversation with Chloe Saracco

There is a concept in Freudian psychology that feels somehow diminished when translated into English. Wiederholungszwang is usually rendered as “the compulsion to repeat” — accurate, sure, but flat. What Freud understood, developing the idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), was something more specific and more troubling: that certain kinds of repetition are not attempts to recover pleasure, or to relive what was good, but attempts to master an experience that was never properly processed.

The person who keeps returning to the same damaging relationship, the soldier who relives the same moment of terror in his dreams, the child who replays a frightening game again and again — none of them are seeking to reproduce pain. They are seeking, through repetition, to achieve a mastery over it that the original experience denied them. The repetition mimics healing. It does not achieve it.

Has Sweeney Todd swum into your mind yet?

Sweeney Todd at Skylight Music Theatre. 📸: Mark Frohna

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We are presented in Sweeney Todd with several characters whose inner lives are organized around the compulsion to repeat in precisely Freud’s sense. They are not people who might change, who might work through their damage and emerge otherwise. They are people for whom repetition is the condition. As we explored in last Sunday’s essay, the ritual is the wound, wearing the costume of the cure.

Consider what it means that Todd, returning to London after years of penal exile, is reunited with a pair of razors. The objects he greets in “My Friends” — devotionally, tenderly, patiently — are what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott would have recognized as transitional objects: things that stand in for an absent relationship, that are handled repeatedly as a way of managing an absence that cannot otherwise be borne.

Winnicott developed this concept to describe a child’s blanket or stuffed toy — the object that represents the mother when the mother is not there — but the structure applies wherever a person invests an object with the weight of a lost relationship and returns to it, over and over, as a way of remaining in contact with what is gone.

Todd’s razors are transitional objects of a particularly dark kind.