Chapter XXIV. Primary Maternal Preoccupation [1956]

THIS CONTRIBUTION is stimulated by the discussion published in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Volume IX, under the heading: ‘Problems of Infantile Neurosis’. The various contributions from Miss Freud in this discussion add up to an important statement of present-day psycho-analytic theory as it relates to the very early stages of infant life, and of the establishment of personality.

I wish to develop the theme of the very early infant-mother relationship, a theme that is of maximal importance at the beginning, and that only gradually takes second place to that of the infant as an independent being.

It is necessary for me first to support what Miss Freud says under the heading, ‘Current Misconceptions’. ‘Disappointments and frustrations are inseparable from the mother-child relationship.…To put the blame for the infantile neurosis on the mother's shortcomings in the oral phase is no more than a facile and misleading generalization. Analysis has to probe further and deeper in its search for the causation of neurosis.’ In these words Miss Freud expresses a view held by psycho-analysts generally.

In spite of this we may gain much by taking the mother's position into account. There is such a thing as an environment that is not good enough, and which distorts infant development, just as there can be a good-enough environment, one that enables the infant to reach, at each stage, the appropriate innate satisfactions and anxieties and conflicts.

Miss Freud has reminded us that we may think of pregenital patterning in terms of two people joined to achieve what for brevity's sake one might call ‘homeostatic equilibrium’ (Mahler, 1954). The same thing is referred to under the term ‘symbiotic relationship’. It is often stated that the mother of an infant becomes biologically conditioned for her job of special orientation to the needs of her child. In more ordinary language there is found to be an