(Accepted for publication 12 March 2014)

The theoretical tension raised by the concept of infantile neurosis is featured all through the Freudian corpus - caught at the crossroads between the psychic facts of the child's development (infantile history and clinical study of pathologies) and the universal structure of unconscious complexes, including the Oedipus complex (the model of intrapsychic conflicts and of the process of “civilisation” undergone by the child). Inscribed in diachronic “temporality” like every individual lived experience and its vicissitudes, or “extemporal” like every organising schema and the structuring of repressions that it elicits, infantile neurosis leads us to examine the metapsychological status of defence mechanisms.