The Child's Tie to his Mother: Review of the Psychoanalytical Literature1

The hypotheses advanced during the past fifty years by psychoanalysts regarding the nature of the child's tie to his mother are numerous and diverse. As always, Freud's evolving views cannot be understood unless they are traced historically. In reading his works we are at once struck by the fact that it was not until comparatively late that he appreciated the reality of the infant's close tie to his mother, and that it was only in his last ten years that he gave it the significance we should all give it today. We may recall the passage in his paper of 1931 on ‘Female sexuality’ in which he confesses how elusive everything connected with the first mother-attachment had seemed to him in his analytic work and how he had found it difficult to penetrate behind the strong father-transference which his women patients made to him. What then struck him as new, he states, was the ‘equally intense and passionate’ attachment to the mother, which precedes the dependence on the father, and the length of time this attachment lasts (S.E., 21, p. 225). Freud's neglect in his earlier work to give due weight to this early tie2 has had far-reaching effects on psychoanalytic theorising. His first serious discussion of the matter was not until 1926 (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety).

Realisation of the tremendous importance of this first attachment seems to have been reached by Freud in a number of steps. Up to the early ‘twenties he had held the view that, apart from a fleeting moment during which the oral component has the mother's breast as an object, all the components of libido start by being auto-erotic. This view, stemming from the Three’