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From the first moments after birth, the mother-child relationship is complex and of great emotional importance. Awareness of this has induced researchers to seek the origins of mental and relational life at increasingly earlier stages of ontogenesis (Mancia 1981).
Recent ultrasonographic studies (Ianniruberto and Tajani 1981) and neurophysiological research have made it possible to put forward the hypothesis that in the foetus there are to be found the beginnings of a process entrusted to agents whose development runs parallel to the evolution and establishment of the processes of cerebral synaptogenesis (especially of the cortical type).
This tends to modify the old concept of development in stages and to replace it with a model of development which implies that the formation of a self goes hand in hand with the development of other, motory, sensory or integrative bodily functions, which are related above all to states of consciousness.
When I refer to the self in connection with the foetus, what I mean is