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Published online: 5 March 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
In her new book, Le bébé analysant (Babies who analyze), the French psychoanalyst Marie Couvert further develops her hypothesis, already implicitly present in The Baby and the Drive (2021), of the ‘analyzing baby’: a little subject in its own right, actively and creatively trying to respond to the real to which it is exposed, using the means at its disposal. Her book starts from two seemingly simple questions: what exactly are we doing when working with a baby, and what should guide this treatment?
Her answer relies on the notion of a ‘trait’ (un trait): a bodily event which the baby produces with a certain regularity or permanence and which the analyst reads as a subjective production, one that is waiting to be ‘processed’ or treated (traiter) by the caregiving other. The trait cannot be reduced to the baby’s characteristic. Rather than being an inherent quality, it is an invention, the infant’s first and unique way of responding to the world, which is always already addressed to the others around them. Couvert’s stance is radical in being able to presume this address even in babies who present severe forms of withdrawal and in ‘reading’ the traits in manifestations that are usually incredibly subtle and often troubling for the baby’s entourage.
Couvert lays out her theoretical apparatus by first commenting on Freud’s notion of the Nebenmensch and on Lacan’s theorization of how the circuit of the drive is established, as well as seminal cases of withdrawal in young children presented by Melanie Klein and Rosine Lefort. Her text also frequently refers to the work carried out by Marie-Christine Laznik’s team at the Necker-Enfant Malades Hospital in Paris, which documents the possible role analytic intervention can play in helping to ‘jumpstart’ the process of drive circulation.