EXCERPT As we saw above, Freud had already speculated—in lost and unpublished papers on his phylogenetic fantasies—that we each recapitulate the Ice Age traumas of early humankind. However, Freud’s Hungarian protégé, Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) bore this line of thought out to its furthest, most vertiginous, conclusions. Already in 1913, Ferenczi was supposing that we ‘faithfully recapitulate in our individual life’ the ‘misery of the glacial period’ along with other ‘geological changes in the surface of the earth’. In 1915 Freud wrote to his younger colleague, praising Ferenczi’s ‘fruitful and original idea about the influence of geological vicissitude’. This ‘original idea’ would see its full explication, however, in 1924’s Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, where Ferenczi extends the scope of trauma-inscription far beyond the confines of human prehistory, announcing our retention of the archaeo-evolutionary trauma of the transition to land. In a radicalisation of the ‘oceanic feeling’ hypothesis, Thalassa suggests that, just as the neonate longs for regressus ad uterum, the migration from ocean to land installs a ‘thalassal regressive trend’ in terrestrialized animals—a longing to return to the sea…