The Child Within the Adult: echoes of childhood in the psychic life

There is within each of us a current that silently runs through. We do not always know where it comes from, but we feel its force guiding our choices, our passions, and even our downfalls. Psychoanalysis calls this current the unconscious; I like to think of it as a deep ocean.

In the song Timoneiro, Paulinho da Viola sings in the chorus: "It is not I who sails myself, it is the sea that sails me." The phrase suggests that, no matter how much we cling to the illusion of control, there are greater forces — unseen and silent — that carry our course. The same happens with psychic life: we are crossed by marks, desires, and stories that we do not entirely master.

There are moments when we feel we are not fully in control. We react unexpectedly, we become more emotional than seems reasonable, we carry pains and desires that appear to have no logical explanation. In such moments, psychoanalysis invites us to look inward and ask: where do these traces that shape our ways of being come from?

When Freud formulated the theory of the unconscious, he shook the rationalist view of human beings. The idea that part of our psychic life operates outside of consciousness — ruled by repressed desires, timeless and insistent — opened a space for us to realize that what we lived in childhood never completely disappears. On the contrary, it returns, inscribed in the body, in speech, and in the bonds we weave throughout adult life. It is at this point that the notion of the "child within the adult" as elaborated by Minerbo, emerges: a subjective structure, formed in the earliest years of life, that is not limited to memories, but composes the very foundation of who we are.

Timoneiro

"(…) It is not I who sails myself It is the sea that sails me It is the sea that carries me As if I were meant to go (…)"

— Hermínio Bello de Carvalho & Paulinho da Viola

Far beyond being a stage of development, childhood is an experience that organizes the subject. Freud showed that sexuality does not begin at puberty, but sketches itself from early on, fragmented, polymorphous, traversed by partial drives. It is on this terrain that the unconscious takes shape. This perspective was, and still is, disturbing. To think that the child is not merely an innocent being in growth, but someone who already experiences desire, pleasure, and anguish, broke with centuries of idealization. Psychoanalysis makes it clear: the adult we are today carries within us the child we once were. Costa summarizes this well by stating that psychoanalysis and childhood are indissociable, for it is in this soil that both the creative potentialities and the sufferings that mark psychic life germinate.

This understanding opens the way for us to see how childhood marks are translated into scars in adult life. For Freud, psychic processes are governed by the pleasure principle: a constant attempt to reduce tension and avoid displeasure. This dynamic, inaugurated in the earliest years, leaves scars that follow us throughout life. The problem is that not all desires can be satisfied. What is forbidden, painful, or prohibited is repressed — pushed away from consciousness, but not eliminated. These contents return in disguised form: in dreams, slips, symptoms, or even in the choices we make in love and work that seem to repeat old scripts. Thus, when an adult reports relationship difficulties, irrational fears, or anxieties without apparent reason, psychoanalysis understands that it is also hearing the voice of a child. As Minerbo says, the analytic setting exists to give voice to the "suffering of the child-in-the-adult."

But these scars do not show up only as clinical symptoms. They seep quietly into everyday life. The curious thing is that we do not necessarily need to dig up old memories to notice the child within. It appears in the present: in the way we organize our room, in how we respond to criticism, in the silences we choose to keep. Each detail of daily life may carry echoes of childhood. A simple habit of avoiding conflict, for example, may reveal the mark of a childhood where confrontation was dangerous. The compulsion to please may be the vestige of a child who only received affection by meeting expectations. Even the way we relate to our body, to food, and to work can be read as a continuation of childhood experiences. The adult always speaks with the voice of their own history — even if unconsciously.

This is why the role of psychoanalysis is not merely to bring memories to the surface, but to build a space of listening in which the subject may recognize the child that inhabits them. It is not about infantilizing the adult, but about unveiling the unconscious logic that structures psychic life. This listening differs from ordinary listening. The analyst is attuned to what slips, what repeats, what goes unsaid. It is a listening that sees meaning where there appears to be only noise. By recognizing this dimension, the possibility of transformation opens up: not the erasure of the past, but the giving of a new place to it in the subject's narrative.

If childhood is so decisive, what happens when it is lived in conditions of vulnerability? A turbulent early childhood can compromise an entire psychic trajectory. Situations of violence, neglect, or emotional instability do not vanish with time — they reverberate. Adult suffering, in such cases, may be read as the expression of a poorly built foundation, one that must be elaborated so that the subject can find new ways of existing. Hence the importance of public policies and social practices that ensure dignified conditions for children. To invest in childhood is to invest in the mental health of society as a whole.

And if the past was marked by turbulence, the challenge of listening to oneself becomes even greater. Recognizing the child within is not simple — neither in the clinic nor in everyday life. How often do we react disproportionately, only to realize later that the present situation awakened something much older? How often do we repeat patterns we swore to avoid? This is the trap of the unconscious: it operates outside awareness, yet it guides our actions. Psychoanalysis does not promise to eliminate it, but to open a space of listening where it is possible to recognize these movements, name them, and little by little, re-signify them.

To speak of the child within the adult is to remember that we never entirely cease to be the child we once were. That child remains alive, sometimes as a wound, sometimes as a source of creativity, desire, and vitality. What makes the difference is what we do with this presence. If we remain trapped in trauma, the child becomes a prison. But if we are able to work it through, it transforms into potential: a scar that, instead of limiting, may remind us of where we came from and give us direction.

Psychoanalysis, therefore, invites us to welcome this inner child — not as a banal metaphor, but as the effective structure of our subjectivity. To look at the child within the adult is to look at the origins of suffering, but also at the possibility of creating new paths. And perhaps, in the end, we may once again agree with Paulinho da Viola: it is not only ourselves who sail us; it is the sea that sails us — that deep unconscious, marked by childhood, that carries us along unexpected, yet always revealing, routes.