Desires to be connected with everyone else, to feel the barriers between self and others disappear and to enjoy a complete interconnection of experience, are powerful collective forces in this culture. One of the paradoxes and impossibilities of this wished for state of harmonic engagement is that the individual absorbs the wish from the collective; the individual only becomes who they are, and able to articulate the wish by virtue of their place in a wider symbolic matrix. Many varieties of psychoanalysis participate in that paradox by locating the wish to return in the individual, rather than in the collective, and finding narcissistic impulses to ‘return’ in the child within. Like notions of heritage in late modernity, however, this ‘return’ is constructed for us, and it constructs a place for us that never was.

One way of ‘returning’, appropriately enough, is through ‘Ecstasy’, a drug in tablet form best taken while dancing. Go to a club, perhaps ‘Paradise’, and smuggle a dose past the bouncers in your sock. Perhaps you would buy one inside. In my case, an angel bought me one for my birthday. Dope slows you down, unlike Speed, and although it helps you dance for a long time, you are still pretty much in control. One thing I had noticed about the club called ‘Home’, however, had been how friendly all the hot and strobe-lit bodies had been.