grow up

I enjoy Freud and find that some of the worst pedantic empiricist technophile types (among others) really don't like him, portray him as a joke, etc. But the idea that early childhood things persist in maybe altered form into adulthood seems just totally beyond doubt to me.

Language acquisition, for instance, is largely complete by the age of 7 and remains basically unchanged after that. The main tool that you use to express yourself was built by an idiot child (you, formerly), the finest, grandest sentences you construct come from the tools you came up with on your own when you were a toddler. Little You came up with a way to pronounce 'dog' or any other word and the now version of you, upstanding adult that you are, still use that same pastel cartoon pronunciation.

This is of course not the same stuff that Freud was talking about, but it's related, and it's not clear how many other things work in a similar fashion, how many other things are fixed in your head as a child and persist into adulthood, still in that childish form but in a way that we no longer acknowledge as childish.

This sort of thing came to mind when I was doing some class with a group of I guess dionysian anarchists, who were talking about the toys that were used to lure dionysus out and kill him or something. It was fun and it made me think about how our innate ideas (rationalist, Kantian) shape our lives, how things, childish or ancient, persist through time and are expressed in weird ways because whatever fodder we're given, we can't help but use those innate ideas to construct our perception. We've had the same innate ideas as long as we've been anatomically modern humans, and though they probably shape experience is hyper-abstract ways, it's fun to pretend that we can discern their workings in comprehensible ways. Even if they're silly: Zeus impregnating daughter persisting into Polanski's Chinatown, The labyrinth living on as a corn maze.