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Q. The infant ‘observed’ by those who study the newborn baby and the ‘child’ in the traditional clinical situation are two quite different concepts. What can you tell us about this difference?
A. It's true, there is a difference on the methodological and epistemological levels and it's also possible that the two concepts are bound never to meet completely. Still, in my opinion, this is not essential. If one considers psychoanalysis as a form of narrative, made by the analyst and the patient, then the personal and subjective story is a construction of those two people. But it's important to ask what are the criteria for a good reconstruction, for a good narrative, and one important criterion is, I believe, the common sense of such a construction. There are criteria of consistency of the narrative but there are also criteria of ‘common sense’. My question is: where does this common sense come from? Because, in general, common sense comes from all the knowledge one has about what a child is, what its possibilities are, what one can imagine about its subjective world. A large part of what we call common sense is made up of these things and therefore it plays a very important role in the results of infant research. We start to have an idea of how human nature begins and of what things are most important in infancy.
If the two children - the ‘observed’ and the ‘clinical’ - were to be kept too far from each other, this criterion ‘of inestimable value’ would be lost