The finding of an object, Freud says in a famous pronouncement about the erotic life, is always a refinding of an object. And yet Freud also questions – in a way that was taken up by later psychoanalysts – the reality of these lost and found objects. He intimates – and states outright – that we may never have had this object in the first place, and that we can’t recover it. That the object, the person we are looking for and can never refind because it never existed, was the wished-for one. We never, in other words, recover from our first false solution to feeling frustrated – the inventing of
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