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I find the topic we have discussed in our seminars this year particularly well-suited to delineating the frontier that psychoanalytic research has arrived at: the affective and emotional dimension of human life, which in the case of man more than in any other animal seems to depend on the meeting between the innate qualities of the new-born baby and the environment in which it is brought up. This dimension, whose significance in the overall scheme of mental life is becoming ever clearer, is being handled in an increasingly better way in the actual psychoanalytic session, guiding and directing the encounter between analyst and patient, and generally proving to be the principal element in what we have come to call the “analytic relationship”.
A psycho-anthropological investigation conducted by Goldschmidt (1975, quoted by Eagle 1984) has brought to light that the adult members of a primitive people such as the Sebei tend to establish