I was sitting in a coffee shop last week, and I swear I wasn’t eavesdropping, but these two people were sitting right next to me talking loudly about short stories they had read. One of the stories they talked about seems to offer a good illustration of Lacan’s idea of the repressed returning from the future . . .

Basically, in the short story, there was a little boy who lived in a haunted house. He would brush his teeth in his bathroom and if he looked in the mirror he would see the ghost of a woman smiling at him. He grew up and later in life he discovered that he would feel more comfortable in a woman’s body, as he realized the source of much anxiety came from being identified as male. After undergoing hormone therapy, she returned to the house she grew up in. Upon wandering through the house, she came to the bathroom she used to brush her teeth in as a little boy, expecting to see the ghost of the woman from her childhood. When looked at herself in the mirror, she realized it was her own reflection that she had misinterpreted when she was a young boy.

Another example I thought of (in true Zizekian spirit of using pop culture texts) to illustrate his point that “only through intervention [on behalf of the return of the repressed] does the scene from the past //become what it always was// is from the movie “The Terminator.” In this scenario, Kyle returns from the future to impregnate Sarah with the savior of the future, John Connor. And only by returning from the future can the events unfold in the way they always were meant to.

Well, examples aside, I don’t know how Zizek reconciles this Lacanian concept of the “return of the repressed” with any “real life” example. Is that even important?