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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…
