The Infantile: More Than Hilflosigkeit?

To the Editor:

The very rich and varied lectures and panels of the 52nd IPA Congress 2021 that I was able to attend share what I see as a historically determined but partial and clinically limitative concept of the infantile. This view of the infantile is heir to the Freudian notion of Hilflosigkeit and highlights its “negative” aspects. The lexical field of its English translation, helplessness, as well as the corresponding terms in other languages (desamparo in Spanish, état de détresse/desaide in French) encompass notions such as dependence, immaturity, abandonment, vulnerability, loneliness, fragility, etc.

An important distinction has often been made between the psychoanalytic infantile and the infant. The infantile is understood as a resurgence/construction of the modalities of early inscription of experience that are construed in the transference. According to the authors, this infantile is conceived in terms of a supposedly primordial and unknowable sexuality; in terms of basic needs of security and protection; of traumatic sequelae linked to the ontogenetic helplessness of the human being; of concrete and non-symbolized modes of thought, etc. The aim of an analysis would be precisely the transformation of the infantile which remains unrevealed in the adult, in the adolescent and in the child. From this point of view, the infantile maintains a contingent link with the infant/ the child; the analyst elaborates hypotheses on the beginnings of mental functioning drawing on the transference-countertransference. A much-debated subject is the contribution of infants’ observation to the construction of such a psychoanalytic infantile. In fact, opinions oscillate between those who regard it as accessory and fundamentally not significant, and those who consider that, at least, there should be no flagrant contradiction between what is analytically construed and what is observed.

Psychoanalysis evolves within a given society and within a language with its meanings, its ov