Repetition Compulsion as Trauma-Replay Wrong Attractor: The Familiar-Pattern Recreation Architecture, Relational Reenactment Basin, and the Return to Novel Attachment

Repetition compulsion — the unconscious recreation of early traumatic relational patterns in subsequent relationships — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_RC in the landscape of novel attachment. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as novel attachment: the capacity to form relationships guided by the present person's actual qualities and the emerging relational field, rather than by template-matching to early attachment figures.

W_RC is constituted by the internal working model (IWM) template mechanism (Bowlby): early relational experiences install attractor basins in the psychological energy landscape that generate automatic pattern-recognition, selecting for familiar relationship structures even when those structures are painful. The familiarity-as-attraction dynamic is central: the IWM generates recognition of familiar relational patterns as 'right' or 'real love,' while genuinely healthy novel relationships may feel foreign or wrong.

The mastery hypothesis — the unconscious attempt to master the original traumatic relationship — is analyzed as an approach gradient that compounds the template mechanism. Nine formal propositions characterize the IWM landscape modification, the mastery hypothesis, familiarity-attraction and novelty-as-threat, neurobiological substrate, disorganized attachment and complex PTSD as basin deepeners, the unconscious nature of recreation, and return paths through trauma-focused therapy and earned-security cultivation.