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The latest clinical and psychoanalytic research shows that the early development of mental representations can be understood only in terms of the competence of newborn babies and of very young infants to form for themselves a representation of the maternal care they receive. In particular, they draw on a rich, if dispersed, sensoriality, which tends to become bound up in the repetition of daily experiences charged with emotional exchanges (Lebovici 1983; Sameroff and Emde 1989; Stern 1985).
The basis for this understanding, it will be seen, is a body of research whose fundamental hypotheses diverge from Freud’s theory of the genesis of the representation of the object. The basic hypothesis of classical analysis is the oral dependence of the neonate, whose initial helplessness (‘Hilflosigkeit’) demands the assumption of the child’s complete union with the maternal caregiver. For Freud, this union is quickly called into question: the baby is confronted with mini-separations, with which it copes by means of oral autoerotism, thereby reactivating the memory traces laid down as engrams stemming from experiences of the satisfaction of feeding needs. The lack of a breast creates the wish for a breast: the baby hallucinates the pleasure before forming a representation of the desired breast. As Freud wrote in 1925, ‘There are [thus] good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it’ (Freud 1905: note in the 1925 edition, 222). To illustrate my own conceptualization of the genesis of mental representations prior to the perception of objects for the purpose of representing them, I wrote that the mother is cathected before she is perceived (Lebovici 1960). This has often been quoted in the French literature.
The thesis that a theory of development attempts to illustrate is, in fact, based on the theory of the mutual attachment betwee