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THE QUESTION OF THE KIND OF INFERENCES, IF ANY, THAT CAN BE drawn from preverbal material in and outside the psychoanalytic situation is a most controversial one. It is, I feel, a very interesting issue, yet quite difficult to deal with. Precisely because verbal
means lend themselves only very poorly to the translation of such material, most researchers have seen fit to create a new language, often filled with metaphors, in order to communicate their findings to others.
Psychoanalytic observational research of the first years of life touches on the essence of reconstruction and on the problem of coenesthetic empathy, both so essential for the clinical efficiency of psychoanalysis.
At one end of the spectrum of opinion on these questions stand those who believe in innate, complex oedipal fantasies, those who, like Melanie Klein and her followers, assume and rely on earliest extrauterine (human) mental life. They believe in a quasi-phylogenetic memory, an inborn symbolic process. For them, no phenomenological, behavioral data can have sufficient validit