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The article is an attempt to account for a significant difference, in occupational clinical psychology, between two dimensions of the repetition of a psychological activity. The first is an “automatic” repetition of the same rigid act in situations that are different. Here we are closer to a compulsion. The second is what we have described as a repetition without repetition, following Berstein. This involves the transformative transferal of the same act to different contexts. Here, repetition produces an other in the same. We have used the theatrical metaphor of rehearsal to account for this difference (the French word répétition having the dual meaning of repetition and rehearsal): the cliché in the player’s acting amounts to a flaw in repetition/rehearsal. And the flaw in repetition, in this sense, prepares the repetition of the flaw. The article is based on a clinical study of postmen and counter clerks working for the post office.