Like Kane's 'Rosebud' it could be that the kernel of your longing is for some lost childhood toy. An imaginative reconstruction in deep memory is needed, but since the longing continually recurs you have an abundance of traces that can be followed. So, it seems that there was the tremendous fulfillment brought about by some object or by some thoughts and fantasies that were catalysed by this object, an extraordinary happiness which did not present itself as a restitution, it looked forward into life, it was the original promise of happiness, but a promise that you made to yourself - it was not all present, but the missing part was assured, you reposed in that assurance. It was the first discovery of a happiness that came entirely from within you, that didn't depend on the love of some Other, perhaps it was the dawning idea that in truth you were the one and only Other. It was evoked by the object, which became the symbol of it, but the object was originally a part of it since there was no sharp boundary between self and world. The object-symbol was there in the wider world as the reminder of what you could always return to. Something that stood out distinct and golden and magical against the crowded background of nodes of meaning that did not pass through you. As time went by it grew more difficult of access and the object-symbol broke into pieces, it became more properly a symbol, or an image-symbol and hence dependent on other symbols according to the laws of differentiation. The object was broken into shards and each part carried only a part of the magic of the whole. And longing, or yearning began to arise in the field of symbol-images as a modulation of that original happiness. Yearning thus as Sehensucht, that is, a seeing and a searching for, a having and a not-having at the same time. And still at first there was a sense that the field of meaning was compact enough that restoration of the object was possible, that the pieces could be put back together. But later as it expanded you no longer had that assurance. The fragments appeared and now they evoked something irretrievably lost, but in the paradoxical mode of yearning.