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Psychoanalysis was born in the midst of the full flowering of the discovery of the internal world; Freud's explorations were of course the major aspect of this development. He began the long, exciting process of elucidating the dimensions of subjectivity that had been described previously as part of the soul or cogito. The notion of inner discourse, a stream of thoughts and feelings, what Amiel explained as “the long stream of mental activity which in man goes on ceaselessly right up to death,” had been identified in various but tentative ways (Jacques, 1991, p. 195).
Literature, art, religion, and philosophy had interpreted these inner patterns, but not systematically as originating inside the mental life and subjectivity of the human mind. At the close of the 19th century, psychology and human mental processes were more clearly described and interpreted, as may be seen in the works of Rousseau, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Blake, and Yeats. Freud more formally changed the unitary notion of subjectivity to a complex one with conscious and unconscious ways of registering experience as well as multiple part-selves that functioned under different motivational systems and logics. He also daringly offered an alternative idea to the then prevalent hope that Reason and language were the basis for individual subjectivity and mind.
Part of the ignorance about the processes of the formation of subjectivity lay in the confused ideas about the mental experience of infants and children. The concept that infants have a mental life from the very first moments of postnatal life, and even in utero, is new to the later 20th century. For centuries, the newborn