Primary Seduction

“[T]he child's mother…not only nourishes but looks after it and thus arouses in it a number of other physical sensations pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her care of the child's body, she becomes its first seducer. In these two relations lies the root of a mother's importance, unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations - for both sexes… And for however long it is fed at its mother's breast, it will always be left with a conviction after it has been weaned that its feeding was too short and too little” (Freud, 1940b [1938]), pp.188-189). Such is the overview that Freud gives of what is commonly called primary seduction.

Today, clinical psychoanalysis is particularly sensitive to the effects of external realities on the internal realities of the subject. And the concept of primary seduction is particularly pertinent when thinking about the entanglement of these two registers. Primary seduction gives us an idea of the complexities of the primary relationship in the infans with its object, while according full importance to the place of the repressed traces of infantile sexuality.

In the initial stages of life, an essentially dissymmetrical relationship is established between the infant and its mother. By loving her infant, the mother unwittingly seduces it and leaves it with the stamp of the marks of her own repressed infantile sexuality reactivated during her close physical relationship with the baby. In its passivity, the baby cannot evade a potentially traumatic seduction by the mother. Through her caresses, her facial expression, the nipple that she puts in its mouth, the mother inaugurates an emotional bond of shared pleasure from which the constitution of an erotogenic body will emerge for the infant.

Primary seduction is thus established in an atmosphere of excitation, of instinctual drive force, of fantasies in a dissymmetrical intersubjective relat