This article examines early subjectivation by approaching the use of personal pronouns such as “I” and “me” as clinical indicators of bodily and narcissistic organisation, rather than as purely linguistic acquisitions. Drawing on developmental linguistics, it is well established that young children may transiently use the pronoun “me” to designate the caregiver, even after gaining access to “I” as a position of enunciation. This phenomenon is interpreted here as a normative transitional configuration, in which self-experience remains temporarily supported by the other’s body before being fully appropriated.

Natural observations of typically developing children between two and four years of age provide a non-pathological developmental reference for this configuration. A brief clinical vignette drawn from the literature (Denis) situates this transitional arrangement within a broader spectrum of subjectivation, showing that access to “I” may emerge within a relational and specular framework before the self can be assumed as an object of experience. By contrast, the main clinical case presented in this article, Robinson, explores a configuration situated upstream of pronominal usage. In this case, the bodily and narcissistic conditions that ordinarily allow sensory experience to be gathered and internalised are not yet established, preventing any stable position of enunciation.

Through the analysis of therapeutic work with Robinson, the article shows how the clinical setting seeks to support, at a pre-verbal level, the emergence of continuity, trace formation, and bodily cohesion, which normally precede pronominal appropriation. Taken together, these elements suggest that access to “I” as an enunciative position may precede the more demanding psychic operation required to assume oneself as “me”. The maternal body is conceptualised as an initial point of orientation and support, whose internalisation enables the passage from primary to secondary narcissism. Pronominal usage thus appears as a sensitive clinical index of the gradual appropriation of bodily unity and the emergence of the self as an object of experience and representation.