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MY CONTRIBUTION to this Symposium on Transference deals with one special aspect of the subject. It concerns the influence on analytical practice of the new understanding of infant care which has, in turn, derived from analytical theory.
In the history of psycho-analysis there has often been a delay in the direct application of analytical metapsychology. Freud was able to formulate a theory of the very early stages of the emotional development of the individual at a time when theory was being applied only in the treatment of the well-chosen neurotic case. (I refer to the period of Freud's work between 1905 and 1914.)
For instance the theory concerning the primary process, primary identification, and primary repression appeared in analytical practice only in the form of a greater respect that analysts had, as compared with others, for the dream and for psychic reality.
As we look back now we may say that cases were well-chosen as suitable for analysis if in the very early personal history of the patient there had been good-enough infant care. This good-enough adaptation to need at the beginning had enabled the individual's ego to come into being, with the result that the earlier stages of the establishment of the ego could be taken for granted by the analyst. In this way it was possible for analysts to talk and write as if the human infant's first experience was the first feed, and as if the object relationship between mother and infant that this implied was the first significant relationship. This was satisfactory for the practising analyst but it could not satisfy the direct observer of infants who are in the care of their mothers.
At that time theory was groping towards a deeper insight into this matter of