…Anyone familiar with the human mind knows that scarcely anything is so hard to forgo as a pleasure one has known. The truth is that we cannot forgo anything, but merely exchange one thing for another; what seems like a renunciation is in fact the invention of a substitute, a surrogate.

-Freud, The Creative Writer and Daydreaming

Fantasy as a replacement for playing, art as surrogacy for fantasy, one love object replaced by another—he’s talking about mourning. And the first thing we lost.

Crossposted with Love Dog.