Freud is doing something subtler than simply saying "the past matters"—he's insisting that our very identity is *constituted* by history, not merely shaped by it. We don't possess a fixed self that past events have influenced; rather, we *are* the accumulated weight of what we've experienced and survived. Consider someone who grew up poor: they might achieve wealth later, yet remain forever marked by that scarcity, making choices a trust-fund child would never make, not from residual trauma necessarily, but because poverty literally built their being. This explains why two people with identical present circumstances can be fundamentally different people—their pasts have made them so.