In forty-five brief propositions, the author explores the closeness and the difference between “early” and “premature” by inserting the questions of the primal and of après-coup. It is proposed, among other things, that “early” is a matter of empirical developmental observation, whereas “premature” mainly refers to the recognition of the particular situation of the newborn and its “statutory prematurity”. A situation in which the subject who is observing must also be included, so that the Hilflösigkeit in humans concerns a relationship, hence the newborn plus the adult taking care of it. Between the notions of early and premature enters the Winnicottian notion of “deep” which invokes a psychic complexity marked by the après-coup, even if Winnicott does not explicitly refer to the latter. As for the “deep”, it refers to the primal as actual time, that is to say neither early nor premature—a kind of primordial temporal source, of which the early and the premature are crystallizations.