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Paper read before the 20th Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, Paris, July–August, 1957 and published in 1958 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39: 167–171.
The second half of the first year of life and the beginning of the second year are characterized by multiple learning convergent with achievements that lead to a fundamental change in attitude towards the external world, a change as significant as birth; the child stands up, walks and is weaned.
I believe that standing erect and walking arise from an overwhelming necessity in the child to break away from the mother in order not to destroy her, although these same achievements serve him later in his need to regain her, and that speech, permitting the magic reconstruction of objects, helps him to work out depressive anxieties increased by dentition. For the child the utterance of the first word means a repetition of the loved-hated object, which he reconstructs inside and flings into the external world. In the second place comes the experience that speech puts him in contact with the world and that it is a means of communication.
Weaning is the consequence of a whole process of detachment whose essential and ultimate motor is the intensification of the depressive anxiety (1), intensification due to the advent of teeth, instruments that render possible the concrete realization of destructive phantasies.
This determines in the child: (i) the need of separation from the mother in order to preserve her, partly losing the communication achieved so
far; (ii) the need of seeking new forms of connection with her; and (iii) I postulate the existence a genital phase previous to the anal and polymorphous one.
The starting-point of my observations was Melanie Klein’s concepts on the first stages of development, especially those referring to the depressive position and the formation of symbols (2). I consider this paper a development of these ideas encountered during my experiences in the