Abstract
Our pasts have a vertiginous pull on our present lives. While we may experience the continual emergence of new desires, our true object of desire, what we find ourselves called back to again and again, is the past. This is the human condition as Freud understood it. The force of the past makes itself manifest in all corners of Freud's thought, for example, in the logic of substitution that pervades Freud's theory of Ubidinal attachment. When we seek lovers, according to Freud, we seek a substitute for the early infantile situation in which we were fused with our caregiver. Thus, adult desire is strongly predetermined by our infant experiences, so much so that the desire structured around cathartic release is considered secondary to an original directedness toward non-excitation. For the most part, for Freud, pleasure occurs with the absence of excitation. And yet, in our adult lives, we only know this through the dialectics of catharsis. The pull of the past is also evident in the stubborn persistence of structures which allow us to hold onto the desires of childhood in a realm set apart from the real world where such satisfaction proves ever impossible. I will return to each of these discussions in more detail later. For now, suffice it to say that in many ways, Freud shows us that human Ufe is an ongoing repetition of the same.