Semiotic Transformations in Psychoanalysis with Infants and Adults

The author addresses issues that emerge when we compare psychoanalytic experiences with adults and with infants. Two analyses—one with a 35 yearold woman and one with a 2 week-old boy and his mother—illustrate that infant psychoanalytic experiences help us understand and handle adult transference. However, we cannot extrapolate infant experiences to adult work. Truly, witnessing the baby's communication widens our sensitivity to non-verbal layers of the adult's communication. Infant work also offers a direct encounter with the container and the contained personified by a mother with her baby. But we need to conceptualize carefully the links between clinical experiences with babies and adults. When we call an adult transference pattern ‘infantile’, we imply that primeval experience has been transformed into present behaviour. However, if we view the analytical situation as one in which infantile invariants have transformed into adult symptoms, we face the impossible task of indicating the roots of the present symptoms. The author rather suggests that what is transformed is not an invariant infantile essence but signs denoting the patient's inner reality. He proposes we define transformation as a semiotic process instead of building it on an essentialist grounding. If we view the analytic situation as a map of signs that we translate during our psychoanalytic work, we can proceed into defining containment as a semiotic process. This idea will be linked with a conceptualization of the mother—infant relation in semiotic terms.