Building on post-Freudian literature concerning the role of the object in psychic development, two postulates are derived: the need to be caused and the wish to be caused. The first is viewed as a universal, biological, predisposition, requiring an adequate parental psychosexual response. The infant needs to be desired as a subject before existing as a subject. Failing to find a willing adult partner, and despite adequate physical care, the infant's genetic programme for development can be compromised. A later consequence of this fundamental predisposition, which accompanies the subject's emergence as a psychosexual being in its own right, is a primal interpretative response to its first objects, product of the human subject's impulse to auto-theorise. As the child's representational capacity augments, it tries to decipher the meaning it has posed for significant others, and to account for its own reactions to them. In its primal interpretative response, need metamorphizes into wish. The nascent subject turns the psychical priority of the other into a wished for identificatory position, sowing the seeds for later fantasy life. We are no longer just caused; we want to be caused and we seek to understand what causes us.