Yesterday a fiction, now a reality, the humanoid robot, an intelligent machine designed after the human model, embodies ancestral dreams, with the aim that the copy meets or exceeds its model and creator, or even makes a jump in evolution, beyond the difference between humans and machines and beyond death. This study addresses what underlies the realization of robots, the challenges they open up to, and what their characteristics may say about humans today.After examining the mythological and technical origins of the robot, it presents today’s key research topics in the field of human-robot interaction. With regards to the contemporary context dominated by science and neoliberalism, and marked by the imagination of science fiction and new technologies, as well as by the 20th century’s collective death inheritance,this work studies the original fantasies and the drive dynamics involved in the advent of the humanoid robot. The repetition compulsion and the human attempts to subjectify their position in the lineage and their transgenerational legacy in its unrepresentable or traumatic parts, show when approaching what humans deliberately reproduce in their artificial double,as well as what they deposit in it unknowingly. Though mainly a scientific invention and a technological tool, the humanoid robot may be regarded as a symptom, a transitional object or a piece of art. This particular status translates into a double ambivalent psychological resistance: constructing the humanoid robot and interacting with it, may develop into analienating repetition compulsion, as well as revive the subjectivation process.
