11 Oct Love and Repetition: What We Look for in a Partner
Many times we believe we choose our partner in total freedom, but in reality much of our choices are marked by repetition. What attracts us does not always arise in the present, but in unresolved childhood scenes. This raises an important question: are we seeking care, attention, and recognition from our partner, or from those early figures who raised us? The unsettling part is that the position we end up in often feels familiar, as if we had already inhabited it before.
Analysis does not erase childhood, but it does allow us to reposition it. It helps us recognize that what we ask for today began long ago, and that it is not about the other person coming to repair that absence. Rather, it’s about being able to see our partner as someone with whom we can create something new and different, not as a repetition of a past debt.
Sigmund Freud, through the theory of the Oedipus complex, showed that childhood experiences resurface in our choices of love. Those early bonds leave traces that shape how we desire and relate in adulthood. Later, Lacan deepened the notion of love by pointing out that what returns is not only the childhood scene, but also the impossibility of finding another who will complete us. That void persists, and the more we expect our partner to fill it, the more evident it becomes that completeness does not exist.
