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From here, Fleischner goes on to discuss Freud’s idea of the “compulsion to repeat”:

the idea that, over the course of a life, each individual symbolically restages powerful experiences out of a complex tangle of motivations: to test, verify, and correct reality; and to master or give vent to underlying feelings of rage, fear, frustration, and pressures for revenge. In this way, the psychoanalytic model of the vicissitudes of remembering is consonant with . . . the autobiographical project to ‘supplement’ a ‘never acceptable’ past. (20)

Although the Freudian compulsion to repeat is presumably less conscious and perhaps also more urgent than the autobiographer’s desire to retell his or her life story as literature, the analogy between these two forms of “repetition” holds, suggesting, in Fleischner’s words, “that there is a continuum between unconscious and self-conscious narrative positions along which all narrators move” (20). In other words, individuals’ narration of their memories in autobiography is inextricably linked to their earlier and ongoing narration of their memories to themselves in an effort, as historian Jacquelyn Hall puts it, to “secure their identities” (440).