You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What is originality? To see something that still has no name; that still cannot be named even though it is lying right before everyone’s eyes. The way people usually are, it takes a name to make something visible at all. Those with originality have usually been the name-givers.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (2001).
The infantile, in all its richness and complexity, is one of these things to which Freud gave a name. It is one of the main Freudian discoveries and, as Virginia Ungar states in her call for proposals for this Congress, “without the notion of the infantile, psychoanalysis simply would not exist”, a statement with which I fully agree.
The infantile is a distinctive mark of the human; all psychoanalysts deal with and handle this psychic dimension. The infantile is not something that concerns only child analysts, nor is it equivalent to childhood or to development stages. Unrelated to behavioural infantilism, the infantile – always sexual in the Freudian perspective put forward in the “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (Freud 1905/1949) – can be apprehended in the psychoanalytic experience as a princeps manifestation of psychic reality, of the unconscious dimension of human subjectivity. The important contributions of generations of post-Freudian analysts have enhanced our understanding of the infantile and the complexity of forms and content through which the patient’s infantile is involved in countertransference and has an impact on our clinical practice.
The infantile is the result of a causal, non-linear overdetermination, open to chance, to uncertainty. Far from being a photographic memory of the past or a manifestation of childish behaviour in the adult, the infantile points to the modes of recording and inscribing what Freud called Erlebnis, “childhood experiences”.
The core thesis is that in psychoanalytic clinical practice, regardless of our preferences for this or any other theoretical-clinical model, the effectiveness of these inscription