Member-only story
What do we do with what we’re given?
An inquiry into inheritance
There have been various writers and thinkers of many different sorts who have tried to answer the question — or at least to pose it clearer terms so that some future thinker might answer it — of what can we do with what we’re given? There is the famous quote from Marx’s Brumaire:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
And Heidegger’s inquiry into thrown-ness in Being and Time. In one’s own analysis, if one chooses that route, one encounters this question often: How much of what I want is mine? And how much is theirs [insert any external — but most likely one’s parents]?
In her book on Winnicott, Laura Dethiville says the following:
The baby comes into a world that existed before him… a universe where in theory his place is already inscribed… He will find his place at the junction of these two genealogies [that of the desire of one parent; and that of the other], defined by the signifiers that preceded him in the transgenerational impact. This is how the infant finds himself facing the enormous task of…