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The Promise at Dawn (Gary, 1962) is the original unconscious promise made by every mother to her child, which is then always contradicted by life. It is, however, a mutual promise, despite the ontological asymmetry between the baby and the primary objects. In exchange for parental love, the child is then “required” to fulfil the parents’ dreams of unfulfilled desires (Freud, 1914c).
This narcissistic contract (Aulagnier, 2001) also goes on to have a critical bearing on the construction of the subject’s gender identity and his psychic bisexuality. In fact, the construction of the baby’s internal world and psychic topographies is based on the primary object’s drive motions and primal fantasies but also the mother’s psychic response to his drive demands.
But how are the two psyches of the mother and the child established from the outset? Many authors (Green, 1999; Kaës, 2009; Laplanche, 1989) have shown that the erotic and narcissistic bond between mother and child requires a work of the negative so that some of the mother’s representations and drive motions can still be repressed. These concern in particular primary representations of bisexuality, primal fantasies and filiation, and the mother’s infantile sexual theories.