The precocious child is fashionable today and the biographical account of the Infant of Parma shows us that it was already so in the eighteenth century. The discovery of infantile sexuality in Freud’s Three Essays completely changed the understanding of intellectual precocity. A clinical case will help us to see that intellectual precocity is linked to sexual precocity and nostalgia for primary objects. The seduction or absence of the mother causes an avalanche of innate psychic processes. The disappearance of primitive hallucination in favour of reality-testing is then thwarted. The process of the death drive is set in motion by expressing itself through ego splitting that leads to hyperintellectualization in the child. Winnicott’s thinking made it possible to leave behind the classical metapsychological perspective by showing that a distortion of the gaze directed at one’s child leads to a distortion of the ego in the latter.