André Green, 1979, The Model Child
This article of André Green comes up for heavy criticism in Laplanche's "New Foundations for Psychoanalysis" (in English at page 81-85). I always liked Green and felt that he is a bit short-changed by not clearly belonging to a school or even to a national culture of psychoanalysis, he was for example heavily critical of Lacan, yet Lacanians (and occasionally their feminist critics) have totally dominated the discussion and translation of French psychoanalysis. Perhaps with the current Laplanche renaissance that is changing. This leaves Green sometimes a bit out in the cold (for an example of his break with Lacan, check out this interview that ZP showed me: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/for-the-love-of-lacan-4/). Likewise he is a serious participant in the Kleinian and Independent tendencies in British psychoanalysis but as you will see below, too French by half.
Anyway, I was fascinated by what I could make of this article, which recognizes the mythic and regulative character, this character called Baby, this character called the child, that psychoanalytic theory seems at times to consist in stories about. Sometimes we empiricize, sometimes we structuralize, sometimes we emphasize the uniqueness of our approach, but again and again the same character.
The article was almost impossible to find, but EP has magic library powers, and I decided in spite of my very limited French to make a translation. This is pretty half-assed, I am sort of hoping that someone will have a better suggestion of what to do with it, I'd be happy to share the original with you or invite you to a document if you think you can help me take it the rest of the way, or if you have any suggestions as to how to publish it. For me it's mostly been a happy weekend project, and an exercise in the considerable deskilling of the exercise of translation. This is my translation, but the computer helped considerably. When you have it, you just never get stuck. As you'll see, there may be downsides to that...
Anyway, I love the paper. I thought you might too. Here it is. Maybe another time I'll tell you what I think about it.
Notes:
Green, André. "L’enfant modèle." Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 19 (1979): 27-48.
Paragraph numbers are not in the original article, they are my apparatus
Footnotes have been replaced by paragraph notes
The Model Child (L’enfant modèle)
For Francis Romain
Objective science or interpretive science? (1-12)
¶ 1
Today’s psychoanalysts are divided as to the fundamental criteria [repères fondamentaux] which must determine its future path. Having reached this point in its history, the psychoanalytic movement is hesitant in choosing the way to go. Rather than rehashing the well-known divisions — whether they are quarrels of school (Kleinianism, Lacanianism, etc.) or differences of origin (doctors or lay-people) — listing the divergences and determining which of the given forms the most privileged access to the unconscious, it seems to me more fruitful to try to lay out a more general theoretical opposition. The question is in effect to identity, in the mass of actual knowledge, a fundamental discipline (in the same sense that in medicine we oppose “basic science” [sciences fondamentales] to “the clinical” [clinique médicale]) which is capable of serving as a basic paradigm of psychoanalytic theory. In effect, psychoanalytic theory — which ought to be this basic science itself, in relation to its applications (therapeutic or not) — was given to us by Freud in considerable ambiguity, open to a polysemy which it has not been possible to maintain as is. This may be because Freud’s successors have not been able to put up with his ambiguities [incertitudes], which, while generative [fécondes] for him, became obscuring for them. From then on, all factions of the psychoanalytic movement, inspired by the theoretical leaders who succeeded Freud, have become bearers of epistemological implications, not always explicit, but which form the basis of many debates.
¶ 2
Now that we are investigating the identity of analysts, the best of them seem not to hear one another [ne paraissent pas s’entendre]. Not about what an analyst is — that much can be defined by empirical or intuitive criteria — but on the terrain where an analyst can feel at home, or in his business [à son affaire], when it isn’t a question of his own home, of his own field. Tell me who you haunt… This question of relationships of proximity [voisinage] is not contingent. Because it is in this subject that the implicit references of the analyst become explicit. Certainly, there are psychoanalysts who, jealously guarding their singularity, will refuse any discussion on the basis I propose here. In fact, even if they profess to depend on nothing outside of psychoanalysis, their references appear in the very selection of concepts and their use, in the valorization they will accord to one of them and the interpretation they give — or even in the omission of another. Therefore, and this is inevitable, psychoanalysis evolves, it changes, no one today can support the pretension to a complete fidelity [fidélité integrale] to Freud; the epistemological horizon is modified, volens nolens [like it or not]. We saw this clearly in France with what was called the “return to Freud.” Not only has there never been a return to Freud — at best, a return to certain parameters of his thought — but moreover, this “return” has only served as a standard [étandard] for a thought very distant from what we can draw from a contemporary reading of Freud’s work. And within the psychoanalytic movement, there is no faction which fails to openly claim its affiliation — always considered the most legitimate — with Freud’s thought. Everyone claims to extend Freudian psychoanalysis, but no one agrees on the right manner to proceed in realizing this program.
¶ 3
This is why we should go further, and to look for the aporetic imaginary referents, which are never totally embodied in theoretical production but which nonetheless overshadow it. For me it is only a matter of attempting to clarify orientations and not of identifying theoretical constellations which are immediately representable in the discourse of working psychoanalysts. The opposition that I propose here, to make the theoretical challenges intelligible, is that of the objective sciences and the interpretive sciences. Psychoanalysts concur in saying that the most fundamental quality of psychoanalysis is the search for truth. This, at the time when the concept of truth is most in question, by philosophy as by science. The question is complicated by the fact that it was Freud himself who declared that this value, the “love of truth,” was the responsibility of science alone. Concerned about the future of psychoanalysis, he wanted to protect it from the double influence of priests and doctors. Of religion, Freud rejects not only its function of illusion but also dogmatism and its role in censorship of the freedom of thought. Of medicine, we know he had cause to complain, for nowhere else did he find a more lively opposition to the unconscious, and nowhere else more false certainties about the subordination of the psyche to the nervous system. In sum, psychoanalysis risked being caught between the mystification of the soul and the reduction to a corporal machine.
¶ 4
Freud’s opinion has been variously followed. If psychoanalysis has not succumbed to religious influences — despite the dissident [frondeuses] temptations of some priests —, it has, on the other hand, been well acquainted with appropriation by the medical profession. The consequence has been that, where medicine has become the only route of access to psychoanalysis, a certain idea of science has established principles which it sought to impose on psychoanalytic theory. I say: a certain idea of science, because the attendance of certain scientists has shown them to be much more open, if not to psychoanalysis, at least to the most profound uncertainty [l’incertitude de la plus profonde]. And it is certainly not by chance that those scientists confronted with ethical problems are now calling loudly for the help of specialists in the human sciences to help them resolve — and in fact to get rid of – the thorny questions which have felt overwhelming. Let us remember the example of Einstein resorting to Freud — who couldn’t but [qui n’en pouvait mais] — to respond to the concerns of the League of Nations on the means to prevent future wars.
¶ 5
That this idea of science is on its way to becoming the dominant ideology in the most important group of the psychoanalytic international arouses reactions which allow us to recognize the other major pole of the discussion, the hermeneutic pole {5.1}. At the opposite extreme of the pole of scientific objectivity, hermeneutics rests the progress of psychoanalysis on theoretical axes quite contrary to those which guide the “scientists” of psychoanalysis. Over physical and biological parameters, they prefer cultural parameters, and in culture, they privilege ideology, mythical and religious productions (even when they do not claim any religious faith). To developmental psychology, they prefer historical education, to behavioral psychology [psychologie du comportement], semiology. Rather than “scientistic” science they give their support to epistemological interpretation. So the question is not one of observation — for what can an analyst do in an analytic situation besides “observe by listening”: if the eye hears, the ear sees? — but of indirect, mediated observation. There is an anti-reductionist orientation to the extent that science deliberately chooses to be. Certainly, all knowledge is reductive, and it is rather the options which control the reduction which must be called into question rather than the principle of reduction itself. In fact, the choice of disciplines which oppose objective scientific inspiration is not guided by an anti-scientific position. Orienting oneself toward the examination of culture, symbolism or language and their production is justified in their eyes because that is where man reveals himself more truly, and that the picture drawn by science reveals only a schema without any thickness or density and where metaphorical thought is absent.
¶ 5.1
Resolutely atheist hermeneutics, need we specify it?
¶ 6
That man is caught between the biological and the social is obvious. In adulthood, the interaction and entanglement of these two series of factors creates organizations so complex that we can only analyze their dialectical intertwining, without clear distinctions as to which belongs to which of the series in question. There is then a great temptation to think that by tracing back through life, the child will provide a study where the separation of factors will be more easily readable. Perhaps this is not entirely false. However, we remain victims of the prejudice according to which we have to go from the complex to the simple, in order to elucidate, through progressive complication, the complexity of the starting point. The illusion here is based on cumulative errors of judgment.
¶ 7
The study of the child is based on the idea that the complexity of the child is reducible, if not to simple elements, at least to simpler elements;
this would make it possible to identify the elements of this simplicity sui generis, avoiding adultocentrism [adultocentrisme],; the adult would cease to be a prisoner of his mental categories by uncovering the categories specific to the child;
it would be capable of providing the key to the categories of the adult, which could then be understood as a product of the transformation of the categories of the child considered in themselves;
it would have the advantage, to the extent that the modification over time is intrinsic to its status, of constructing a temporal origin which would bridge that gap between adult and child, and account for [rendrait compte] fo the complexity of the adult.
Thus the child would have the privilege of rendering visible that which, in the adult, is invisible. The point [finalité] of the study of the child is an elective theoretical strategy permitting the construction of the structure of the adult. Even though it is the adult who constructs the structure of the child!
¶ 8
These prejudices are so obvious that it is unnecessary to dwell on the criticism of their naïveté. The “simplicity” of a child is a mirage [leurre], this clearing away of the categories which render one’s own being intelligible finds its origin in the reflection of the adult — and it cannot be otherwise. The categories of the adult are not only not graspable by the so-called [prétendues] categories of the child, but these very categories always issue from the adult, who in the best case – that is to say the case of psychoanalysis — first made the path from the adult to the child, “lost” that he was, on the analytic couch. To seek the child directly amounts to denying that there must first be something repressed in order to know what the repression must repress. To short-change [faire l’economie] this course attests to a misunderstanding of the ignorance which thinks it can trick the unconscious by pretending to grasp on the fly what will be rendered unconscious, at the moment when it becomes so. The smoke and mirrors here [miroir aux alouettes] reflect in the postulation of a “developmental” approach, which hopes, in multiplying the stages of the investigation, to reestablish a false continuity, even though it lacks the theoretical resources permitting it to comprehend the course and sense of the changes. Not to mention what is excluded, by definition, from the investigation, which is always behavioral: the intrapsychic processes and especially the primary processes. The return to origins, as an explanatory approach, with the child as a guide, is just one more sexual theory which the adult gives to his conception of the subject. The critique of these positions is plain to see [saute aux yeux]. I can already hear the protests of those who oppose me because I caricature their thought. But for me it is less a question of giving a faithful representation of what is said and done about the matter, than of revealing a latent theory [latence théorique] — which has already, in many cases, come out of its latency and makes grand claims of being the carrier of scientific rigor.
¶ 9
However, the limitations that science imposes on itself can cause it to miss what is essential in the human condition. And it is in the name of science that a Chomsky stigmatizes the sciences of attitude [sciences du comportement] (behavioral sciences [in English in original]). As soon as psychology or sociology adopt behavior as a reference, they pledge themselves to a certain fundamental inadequacy. And when we speak, in certain psychoanalytic circles, of the psychology of Ego as an important stage of psychoanalysis — where the reference to Piaget is de rigeur —, we can ask ourselves what psychoanalysis has been doing in this mess [galère] {9.1}. Criticisms in this regard of psychology also have also come from the epistemologists. Canguilhem, in a welcome article {9.2}, has undersigned the ideological dangers in the psychological approach. And it is not only psychology in his sights, it is all disciplines which attach the prefix psycho to their field: psycho-sociology, psycho-pedagogy, psycho-linguistics, psycho-physiology, etc., as far as they remain psychologies of consciousness.
¶ 9.1
One can find a good study of the relations between piager and psychoanalysis in De la naissance à la parole (R. Spitz), under the pen of G. Cobliner
¶ 9.2
G. Canguilhem « Qu’est-ce que la psychologic? », in Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des.sciences,- Paris, Vrin, 1968.
¶ 10
One can view the problem from a totally different angle. The child, from infancy to adolescence, is, one says — but are we so sure? —, more dependant on a biological organization which suggests a naturalistic approach, but one has to immediately correct this assertion and insist on the fact of the fact that all learning [l’apprentissage] in the adult state depends on the given order of culture, which is to say, it issues from the relation with the parents and their substitutes as they are deeply acculturated. We still need to grasp the means by which this culture is transmitted: are these influences “psychological” or “sociological?” Or does the work of acculturation pass through symbolic mediation? It is here that hermeneutics has its say, with the emphasis that it places on speech, symbolism, myth (personal or collective, conscious or unconscious), rites (always and above all rites of passage), tradition, history, customs, ideologies, and alas, today, whatever is transmitted by media. This entire area relates to a science of interpretation.
¶ 11
History, yesterday, wanted to be scientific. She lured herself into this illusion with Marxist economism. The “new history” [«nouvelle histoire»] has understood — as has Marxism, though with what delay! — that the social imagination is as important — if not more — as historical geography, demography, relations of classes, the economy, etc. For the child, it is the same: to direct observation, to the longitudinal, to the the naturalistic approach, to the appreciation of family relationships will always lack an essential dimension, namely the deduction of intrapsychic function, which alone will be able to tell, not how the child experienced a given situation or event, but how he internalized and interpreted the human environment that was his. This is the true science of the subject that psychoanalysis can contribute to. This is why our critique will spare the psychoanalysis of children — which is an application of psychoanalysis like any other, with its difference and its specialty — by distinguishing it from the work of psychoanalysts with children, which has its necessity but remains on the periphery of psychoanalysis itself. This, of course, is on the condition that child psychoanalysts renounce once and for all any claim to restore a “realist” point of view of the infantile psyche.
¶ 12
The usefulness of the activities of psychoanalysts with children is not what is in question here. What is questionable, are the theoretical inferences or practices which they are tempted to make from an experience that they cannot help but consider the royal road [voie d’accès privilégiée] to the human psyche.
The child, the norm and the norm of the theory (13-23)
¶ 13
It is appropriate to question the political implications of these activities. Psychoanalysis is often criticized in our time for being normative. Psychoanalysts who work in institutions — especially psychiatric ones — are even more criticized for lending a hand to state ideology and power. The defense of psychoanalysts concerned [soucieux] to carry their expertise to the relief of human suffering, is not without basis. It is also valid for child psychoanalysts. But there is a big difference between the child and the adult. The adult, even if he is subject to the constaints of society and power, can always defend himself against them. This is what he never fails to do. The child is defenseless, or better, he is nothing but defense. Incapable by his condition of modifying the reality that surrounds him, he has no other resource than to modify his psychic reality by installing defenses which seriously mutilate him. Winnicott’s notion of “false self” expresses this situation. Far from seeing this in a uniquely psycho-pathological aspect, Winnicott recognizes that the false self is an inevitable product of education — Freud would say: of civilization — and that it is, to a certain degree, indispensable in policed social relations. But that this normal pressure turns into a normative pressure, that the normative pressure is implemented by the mother who cannot accept her own drives which sees reflected, under a disquieting magnification [grossissement macroscopique inquiétant], in her child, and we end up with the false self which mutilates psychic reality. In the matter of therapy [soins], the question is reversed. It leads not only to the appreciation of the pathogenic effects of the false self, but to the question of to what extent therapeutic action can free the child from it. This is the ideal of the “golden mean” that reigns in infantile psycho-pathology, and the harmonizing virtue of development which depends on cultural rules. Certainly we are all subject to such rules, children and adults, but when we occupy ourselves with children, we ensure their respect, such that with adults, the establishment of such superego structures are more often an obstacle than a safeguard [garde-fou], the analyst doesn’t have to worry about it — or he does not have to only when the superego has already been the object of a pathological regression whose effects the subject already suffers from.
¶ 14
The child, for his part, follows by necessity the channels which adults have opened for him, he obeys the rules they have laid down in his place, he introjects the knowledge that they have decided to teach him, he observes the code defined by the adult. Is this in his interest? Or is it in the interest of the state which wants good citizens capable of achieving the goals it has defined? And if we want to stay within psychoanalytic theory without overstepping its boundaries, we might say that it is quite difficult for the child to abstract himself from his parents’ ideals, which he is always more or less in charge of realizing {14.1}.
¶ 14.1
Even Mealnie Klein, so keen to remain in the field of strident analytical interpretation, with the neutrality that it implies, is not entirely free from normative references. All you have to do is refer to La Psychoanalyse des Enfants p. 24, n. 1, and p. 41, n. 2. We do not lay blame, because the question should really be: if the child, having lived in a given cultural environment and needing to be able to grow up and ultimately live there, can we ever avoid being “normative” [«normant»] with him even if we refuse to be normative?
¶ 15
What a dark picture! Come on, there’s not so much to complain about, childhood remains a green paradise! Certainly. But why? Because the child possess an extraordinary vital potential, a plasticity, an adaptability, which the adult has often lost, and that they face with astonishing strength, the most imposing vicissitudes. Because the child is animated by a love of life {15.1} that is nourished by the love of parents, friends, sisters, and substitute parents that he finds in activity, in play, in the opportunities for pleasure that the dullest fact brings him, a hope without measure. Profitably the illusion: “the child takes it well.” But later, as a teenager, he realizes that this was — for the most part — that which the adults — especially his parents — wanted him to be. He has to mourn it, with difficulty, while safeguarding his libidinal investments so as to be able to gain satisfaction within the limits of tolerable conflict. The sublimations are then put to the test.
¶ 15.1
It is remarkable that the literature of child psychoanalysis includes so few studies of the state of love
¶ 16
These remarks necessarily lead us to the problem of adaptation: a problem neglected by French psychoanalysis — because it is too charged with ideological resonances. In this psychoanalysis resembles the wife of Caesar. But one doesn’t get rid of the problem by turning to American psychoanalysis, any more than by denying it. The adaptive role of psychoanalysis has to be considered with lucidity, because adaptation is not a norm, it is a fact. To be maladapted is a form of adaptation, as much as the conformist’s super-adaptation. The true problem is elsewhere: the adult can choose, to the extent his unconscious permits — maladaptation, but the child can’t. Because the maladaptation of children has never embarrassed society. That of adults poses a whole other problem that carceral and assistive institutions have not succeeded in resolving. The maladaptation of adults can be positive, it can promote, within the frame of “a certain abnormality,” as Joyce McDougall says, an original, creative function. The artist is often not “adapted” to society and the militant revolutionary even less, that goes without saying. The maladaptation of the adult is perhaps a factor in positive change, this maladaptation has often been the precursor of that which will be the norm tomorrow, which will when the time comes, also be completely surpassed. The maladaptation of the child is much more serious. For him, does he pay a heavy price? It closes doors for him and progressively narrows his margin of maneuver.
¶ 17
Hence the ambiguity of the child “psy” [«psy»]. To the extent that he is an “educator,” he will act in harmony with the desire of the state; to the extent that he is an analyst, he will seek to act in harmony with the desire of the subject but, even in this last case, he will be forced to work in accordance with the desire of the state, which wants productive citizens — and reproductive citizens.
In both cases, there is a risk that the child “psy” will only be able to contribute to the formation, under any regime, of model children. The question which we will now consider is whether the child, as a model for the psychoanalyst, can escape the mold of the model child.
¶ 18
One could object that in practice things don’t go this way, and that psychoanalysts are focused on their caring function, striving to ensure that the child “gets better,” outside of any other consideration. To accuse the child psychoanalyst of being in league with the state is to initiate an ugly quarrel, the aim would be to throw suspicion on the specific aims of child psychoanalysts. This would once more take up the themes of anarchist thought, which makes suffering cheap and has in mind only the politics of the worst. And it is true that we must not commit again the error of Reich, who in proposing a more global theory of the parent-child relationship, qualifies the former as an educator, misrecognizing that the parent is above all an object of desire and identification and that, without the love of the parent, the child certainly cannot assure his progression in life. But this is the question. Facing the child, the adult is always caught in this pincer: he is inevitably an object of support [étayage], of love, and of hate, of identification (that is to say, alienation and individuation), and also inevitably an educator. Therefore it is necessary, considering this very entanglement, to be mindful of separating as much as possible the psychoanalysis of the child — by emphasizing its specificity which is indeed that of the inner world of childhood — from all other “psychotherapeutic” approaches: familial, educational, pedagogical, social, etc.
¶ 19
This separation is not always achieved: child psychoanalysts, animated by the best intentions, go beyond their analytic specificity without anything forcing them to do so. Moreover, it isn’t enough. It’s necessary once again to search for that which, in the specific field of psychoanalysis of children, can begin to lend a hand to the persistent deviations of this extended psychoanalysis [psychanalyse d’extension]. And this vigilance ought to manifest itself in theory. Because practice will always be in demand {19.1}: the infant knows, like the psychotic, how to force the analyst to leave the framework, and makes the vicissitudes of his condition an arm in service of his defenses, which are no less exigent than those of an adult. Which psychoanalyst of children has not found himself in the grip of manipulation by the child and his parents? Which child will not levy the means at his disposal to multiply the number of those who must take care of him: doctors, re-educators, tutors [soutiens pédagogiques], and more, all intending to fragment, dilute, and neutralize his treatment? Which child doesn’t play on the culpability given to the contribution of the parents — under one form or another — to pursue his cure? All problems which, with the adult, pose themselves as well, but differently, and are analyzed because the analyst-analsand relationship is without a third party other than the Absent Third Party, symbolic reference.
¶ 19.1
Once again we turn to Melanie Klein, because she tries to be a purist in this material. Pretending that the psychoanalysis of children is a psychoanalysis more “pure” than that of adults fails examination. To be convinced, it suffices to report the first two chapters of La Psychanalyse des enfants. The interpretive genius of Melanie Klein manifests brilliantly here. But under what conditions? The lecture (p. 39 in the French edition) shows us an analyst desiring to soothe the anguish of a child, to reassure her, to play with her at first. But then there is the analyst who plays alone, describing what she does to the terrified child. She puts a doll to bed, announces that she is going to give him something to eat (themes from the previous session), she invites the child to choose hypothetical food, and suck his fingers as if to fall asleep. The child is relaxed on the couch, at the suggestion of the analyst, who will continue to play with the dolls. It is not only the games of the child which take the place of his free associations, but also the games of the analyst which the child cannot play due to his anguish, by inducing material up to the point where she introduces the father’s penis.
¶ 20
It is therefore on the side of theory, against the inevitable hazards of practice, that we must define the status of the psychoanalysis of children. Psychoanalysis of children: the choice must be made between childhood and psychoanalysis {20.1}. How can we separate the wheat from the chaff, at the level of theory, to preserve psychoanalytic thought? We propose here an hypothesis.
¶ 20.1
The entire psychoanalytic community is not mistaken in rejecting the eventuality of an autonomous status for psychoanalysts of children distinct from that of psychoanalyst without label. The choice has been even more difficult because the option “psychoanalyst of children” has been supported by the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis
¶ 21
Everything which, in psychoanalytic theory, is inspired by a developmental perspective on the psychic apparatus, everything that makes ontogenesis its principal reference, everything which situates childhood as a fundamental axis of the theory, everything which, basing itself on this theoretical benchmark to intensify, by all available means, the longitudinal study of childhood, everything that replaces the indirect approach of psychoanalysis by the systematic study of observable manifestations — not only direct observation, but those of an child placed in its familial context, and beyond, in the ensemble of structures which one knows (pedagogical, judiciary, hospitals, etc.) — draws the child toward the side of psychology, of pedagogy, of the relationships with law or medicine and ultimately tends toward “orthogenesis.” We have the greatest respect for the work of psychologists, pedagogues, specialists in juvenile delinquency, pediatricians and pediatric psychiatrists. Their work is useful and necessary, whatever reservations one may reserve regarding certain orientations which the state attempts to give to those organs in its jurisdiction {21.1}. But one has to know that these disciplines will waste no time in imposing their “scientific” or pragmatic views on the psychoanalysis of children. Animated by a concern for efficiency, even to the point of evangelism, the psychoanalysis of children seriously risks having to put themselves in tune with the members of these other disciplines who always ultimately wish to tame psychoanalysis, to “assimilate” it.
¶ 21.1
See the recent emotion raised by the disability law in psychiatric circles.
¶ 22
So one has to reverse course, strategically. The only salvation for the psychoanalysis of children stands on the side of what is totally irreducible to the supposedly “realist” or pseudo-scientific which inspires neighboring disciplines. Because neighboring relations are seductive. They incline analysts of children to think that the neighboring territories are so many domains where psychoanalytic thought can penetrate and convert populations who are only waiting for the good word, and which one can often lend assistance — and sometimes in the best cases — to a frantic orgy [dévergondage effréné] of psychoanalytic knowledge exploited by new users with total impunity, and sometimes culpable incompetence, upon children without defense. It is necessary to go further in casting doubt within psychoanalysis itself, on all everything which claims to modify its theoretical axiology by making the child the privileged source, the norm, of the conscious and the unconscious, the child being in no way the priority material for such a study.
¶ 23
But the fact is, today, developmental thinking dominates psychoanalytic thinking more than any other kind {23.1}. It can feed the richest and most imaginative contributions of Winnicott, the followers of Melanie Klein, or the team of S. Lebovici and R. Diatkine; the most rigorous observations of the group at the Hampstead Clinic in London, the centers in Yale or in New York — where the theories of M. Mahler are elaborated. It can also, it must be said, nourish theoretical conceptions which reflect a disquieting impoverishment of psychoanalytic thought whose representatives are situated on the side of naive biologism, supported by a simplistic psychologism which kills two birds with one stone: the child is the norm of the theory, which wants future adults to conform to the norm.
¶ 23.1
People will say that I’m exaggerating. To take just one example, consult the summary of the latest issue of The International Review of Psychoanalysis (1978, 5, n. 4). Five articles out of Six have the words “development” or “developmental” in their title. Let us refer to the corresponding issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1978, 59, n.4): an article by Emmanuel-Peterfeund “Some critical comments on psychoanalytic conception in infancy” (Int J of Psycho-Anal, 1978, 59, 4, pp 427-442) does not pull any punches. One reads its conclusions: “I have tried to demonstrate that many of the typical definitions of psychoanalysis of early childhood have no logical basis, are based on narrow observations and are of no real use with regard to the child’s world.” The author concludes that psychoanalytic theorizations regarding the child, to the extent that they fit into the general psychoanalytic framework, have no meaning in other frames of reference, namely those of neurophysiology, of biology, of the theory of evolution, or models of information. The author accuses them of adultomorphism and pathocentrism. M. Mahler, in such a perspective, is a dangerous spectator. Needless to say that the author thinks that salvation will come from the disciplines mentioned above. We slide from the unconscious towards the “evolutionary continuum” and psychophysical parallelism, which is to say, reference to the central nervous system. Hence the path to follow: neurophysiology, ethology, and of course “the theories of Piaget and contemporary psychology in general. / Peterfreund is not unique in this vein, far from it. The work of D. Freedman, of S. Furst, go in the same direction, just to name a few of them. But what must be emphasized is their power of contamination. Thus H. Blum, who conducted with tolerance and openness the conference on the formation of the symbol at the Congress of the A.P.I. of 1977 in Jerusalem where Guy Rosolato and Hanna Segal respectively presented a Lacanian and Kleinian point of view on this theme, publishing in the same issue a work on symbolism: “Symbolic process and symbol formation” where the developmental point of view dominates, the autonomy of the ego, the notion of adaptation. Here again Piaget comes to supplement what in Freud testifies to a less realist point of view: “Before turning to some important psychoanalytic developmental studies, I shall refer to the very valuable work of Piaget (1951) on the origins of symbolism” (art. Cit. p. 461). Without a care in the world to address the prior question of the compatibility of the theoretical systems of Freud and Piaget. The agreement is self-evident, even if some discrepancies exist. While the discordance between Lacan, Rosolato, and Freud is underlined. However, we should be able to criticize Lacan by finding a better ally than Piaget. And if Winnicott is finally brought in to help, it is above all to clarify the chronology: the Winnicottian symbol is born in the second semester of life, gestural negation according to Spitz is present at 15 months, and the nomination of objects at 18… Chronology serves here as protection against any theoretical imagination, with the caution of a science of observation which is always more credible than a metaphorical conceptualization.
Ex post facto (An expression used by Freud to designate psychoanalytic elucidation) (24-26)
¶ 24
The unobservable in analysis —what I call l’autrefois and l’ailleurs [formerly and elsewhere but these appear to to be technical terms for Green] — has, in the face of realist thought, only the value of a void to be filled. It is then necessarily that the gaps in the discourse, far from constituting a generative, productive lack of associative relations, be devoid of any theoretical function. They are only patches of darkness on which it is necessary to rapidly light, to evacuate the effects of any imaginative stimulation which may arise from them, and to curb [brider] all thought which challenges a consciousness which illuminates only what it authorizes to come to light, to seal this insult to reason. As if there were an unbearable danger in allowing the lack to work, to generate thought which denounces rationalization. Because that is always the risk we court in privileging everything that relates to observing consciousness.
¶ 25
Imagination, even theoretical, remains “the crazy one” [«la folle»] which must be chased out of the psychoanalytic “dwelling” [«logis»]. What seems not to have been understood by researchers of the sensible — of the visible, of the audible, in short, of the observable — is that if absence is the primary source of the analyst’s imagination — in its most brave speculations [les plus hardiment discutables] — it is subject to the laws which permit one to give it a value of intelligibility: it is not pure unbridled thought. And, in its vagabondage, this vagabondage itself conceals a structure. This was the case for Melanie Klein. That one may think that she was mistaken — as Lacan is also mistaken — does not prevent us from being obliged to recognize the extraordinary impulse that each has given to psychoanalytic thought. This is how it advances, by theoretical blows [coups de boutoirs], which the work of successors rectify, straighten, and refine, sometimes progressively modifying the basic concepts (as Winnicott has done with Melanie Klein) to finally arrive at a theoretical equilibrium where the psychoanalytic thought of an epoch can be recognized — that is to say, making of these concepts theoretical instruments which allow us to think about practice. And these generate new concepts and so on…
¶ 26
Nowadays, theoretical fecundity is inscribed, in my view, against developmental thought. It is in its opposite orientation, on the side of communication, on the side of structures, insofar as these are pierced [trouées], never closed, worked by an imbalance, fertile. All that relates to the concepts of lack and absence here occupies a privileged place, because the function of this negativity is not to solicit the desire to parry it by searching for the pieces which would finally make it possible to achieve a totalization. On the contrary, lack and absence are the locations where correspondences are established between open structures; by the reverberation of the structures with each other, whether or not they belong to the same temporarily. It is through absence that one throw up bridges between structure and history, which become intelligible in the repetition and après-coup [Nachträglichkeit, sorry, not translating it!] and this Janusian dimension of human existence which can be regarded simultaneously from before and after — without seeing anything in the moment, but to be understood ex post facto by hidden recurrence [«récurrence dérobée»]. {26.1}
¶ 26.1
Roger Caillois, in his book, Le champ des signes (1978, éd. Hermann), maintains that one of the most remarkable components of the scientific spirit is the taste, if not the quest [recherche], for improbable truths or hidden evidence, “those which at first defy good sense and accredited opinion. Between plausibility [vraisemblance] and evidence, it is the evidence which must always prevail, which is to say ultimately that the coherence of the data is established as well as possible. If an abused reason or a fallacious logic is scandalized, it is up to them to reform. Implausibility [invraisemblance] is certainly not an index of truth, but it should never distract [détourner] us from it.” (p. 38)
Representation (27-35)
¶ 27
To proceed defiantly, to call for vigilance, to take up the invitation to privilege other theoretical axes, will not suffice. Because, to protect ourselves from this “infantilization” of psychoanalysis, we don’t avoid the problem by limiting certain excesses. What do we do with the child that Freud has placed in our hands? Eliminate with one stroke of the pen the participation of child analysts and the cohort of childhood “psys”? Ban direct observation? This would inevitably lead to a regression. Better to propose another theoretical vision.
¶ 28
Let everything that is done for [pour] the child continue to be done. Let everything that is thought upon [sur] the child be rethought. Perhaps we must finally grasp [pénétrions enfin] the idea that that we can never speak about [de] the child. Because adults who talk of the child always carry within them their own childhood, as the teachings of psychoanalysis have shown that it never passes away with time, but remains intact in the adult. This child, which is omnipresent in the adult and which dictates his most apparently objective views is not the child-in-the-world, nor is it the child-in-the-family; it is the inner child [enfant intériorisé], which interiorizes itself after it has introjected the parental imagos which are constitutive of its psychic reality. Psychoanalysis must renounce the search for the child “in itself” [«en soi»], not because it is inaccessible, but because the child is a fiction of the adult who supposes [prétend] that his childhood is surpassed [révolue]. However, the psychoanalytic revolution has shown that this supposed surpassing of childhood is a myth. There are many infantile fixations which require more or less massive regressions. But these fixations and these regressions testify, on the part of most who are subject to them, not the attachment to their childhood but the rejection of it. “Healing” [«guérison»], when it has the chance to take place, does not consist of overcoming this childhood but on the contrary, of making it one’s own by internalizing it.
¶ 29
Therefore, the matter of analysis is not the representation of the child, otherwise said, the attempt to reconstitute the world as it appears to him, or appeared to him in the past, it is rather childhood as a constitutive mode of representation. Childhood as representation, in the sense in which Schopenhauer spoke of the “world as representation.” As such, childhood enters the sphere of representations and the parameters which control its intelligibility are to be sought in the categories on which its representation depends. It is therefore not because he is less subject to reality that the child interests us, by his supposed inferiority to the adult, but on the contrary, because he is the most blinding [aveuglant] paradigm of a world which one is uniquely an object of representation, where he himself figures only as a symbolic representation of the desire of his parents’ desire, which he must internalize in the difficult task of being an adult.
¶ 30
This function of representation which implies that there is not only the represented but representatives necessarily leads to the double status of the representative: the parents are representatives in the eyes of the child, just as he himself is in their eyes. And his major task is that of representation: representing to the eyes of others, and representing ot his own eyes. One understands that everything in the order of the sensible in the investigation of the child can at best only play the role of day residue [les restes diurnes] in the construction of a dream. And this dream work is only constructed retrospectively [après coup], so childhood can only be spoken of in the past tense. And this is without detectable origin.
¶ 31
So the best use we can make of everything we learn about the child is to dream about our subject [rêver à son sujet]. Everything that comes to us from childhood is essential for psychoanalytic theory, but this reflection is only valid as far as what it gives to thought, what it provides as nourishment for our theoretical stimulation will always depend on the preliminary views and understanding of the one who is attached to this study. This is to say, of the one who is not afraid, before the child, to hear him by letting the child in himself speak.
¶ 32
Today, some psychoanalysts have understood that they must overcome their objectivist prejudices. Countertransference, long viewed with suspicion, has become an indispensable instrument of psychoanalytic elaboration. Interpretation has stripped itself of its rational limitations, opening itself to the dimension of paradox. The child, because there is a temptation to objectivize, lends himself to the machinations which silence his subjectivity. Because he is the subject of representation, which escapes, by definition, the direct apprehension of the sensible. So strong is the temptation to objectivize that — even though the descriptions of the analyst who gives an account of his experience can never lay any claim to the title — here we see that he provides the proof, the very evidence, of his theory. Which of course only convinces those who were convinced in advance, but who need to fabricate proof for others.
¶ 33
We must therefore choose between the sensible on the one hand, and on the other, the imaginable and the deducible, although this distinction is already conceptually obsolete [périmée] to the extent that the “pure” sensible no longer exists. Let us say that we must choose between the limitations imposed by objectivization and the inevitable “supplement” carried by the basic heuristic hypothesis. The first approach, which lays claim to rigor, is ultimately, silent, in its desire not to infer anything; in any case, if it is coherent with itself it can only renounce all grasping of psychic representation. The second attitude, which takes the representation for its object, will accept its conjectural status with complete lucidity, as follows from the definition of representation. Because the specificity of representation is precisely that it is not constrained by the limiting exigencies of reality, but that it possesses as an essential quality of making the possible happen, solely through the play of the psyche. It is conjectural, therefore, in its essence, as necessarily will be the theory which accounts for it.
¶ 34
If we define psychoanalytic reflection and its theoretical goals this way, psychoanalysis is no longer suspect of an adaptive view or of normative obedience. Since its domain is that of the organization of the intrapsychic world in which it is not the reflection of reality but that of the study of the power of the transformation of the former into into the infinity of possible worlds, it no longer encounters the same reproach in respect of its solidarity with those who fabricate the real. Not as it “really” is, but such that its conception allows them to impose it on others. Let us add that childhood is not the unique or privileged place in this infinitude of possibilities. Fiction is not its prerogative [apanage], far from it. Fiction governs the world to some extent, it gives form to the past, which it constructs as history, it commands the objectives of the future, and orients the vision of the present.
¶ 35
Freeing the child from responsibility for fiction, also means ceasing to make him responsible for all our misfortunes {35.1}, as well as of charging him with the execution of the fiction that is in us. It is also a return to the unconscious, not only in that it is timeless but in that it is atopic. It is to finally accept that there is no view of the human that is not adultomorphic and anthropomorphic, that the human never silences the dream of the little man who dreams in man, and that he himself dreams of the little man who is in man, etc.; he never stops representing.
¶ 35.1
Because the infantile attaches to the most precious good “I swear it on the heads of my children” and also to the stigma of backwardness “What an infantile way of behaving!
Which model for psychoanalysis? (36-51)
¶ 36
To date, nothing has contradicted the validity of the Freudian model. While the application of the data constituting the model can be questioned, its general structure remains valid. In the history of Freudian theory, the identification of strong periods, the moments of change that they signify, is more important than the, so to speak, longitudinal study — such as that of Jones — of the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Without the valorization of these moments of “interpretive rupture,” nothing is intelligible, just as nothing is intelligible in the direct observation of a child without the body of theoretical hypotheses which clarify the data. Understanding the relationships between these basic hypotheses and the data of observation in psychoanalysis requires that we refer them to psychoanalysis itself, that is to say, to the unconscious. Said otherwise, the major part of the theoretical hypotheses — the “sexual theories” of the analyst — and their psychic functioning in the analyst-observer are unconscious. Their conscious formulation is always after-the-fact [après-coup]. It is this afterwardness which functions in the theoretical analyst when he attempts to render conscious what is unconscious in the Freudian theory. Because you have to know it completely — from A to Z — to spot, understand, and integrate a posteriori what is, what signifies the strong moments of interpretive rupture. This treatment of Freud’s work can be pursued in post-Freudian theory, but in a different relation, where Freudian theory plays the role of what is repressed in post-Freudian theory. Thus the wide adoption of a development is the sign of an interpretive break with Freud, with what he has left unthinkable, with what can hardly be thought of with him. Post-Freudian theorists, by choosing the most easily assimilable theoretical axes (the developmental point of view), have only followed the theoretical pleasure principle, avoiding the displeasure of thinking the unthinkable.
¶ 37
Fortunately, even in this general orientation, the repressed Freudian theory makes a disguised return in our current preoccupations: in Bion, in Winnicott, in Lacan. It is paradoxically in the work of these innovators that we will find again the repressed Freudian unthought. “Developmental” psychoanalysis has not theorized “the Freudian child”, but is merely a naive hagiography of it. This return of the repressed manifests not in an opposition to the model-child, but in the appearance of another theoretical status of childhood in these authors. For — we must remark — in all three, the child is there. Even with Lacan, whose theoretical evolution begins with the mirror stage, which never ceased to weigh on its later development. Dropping the prey for the shadow, he abandons the infans for the signifier, obligated however to return to it at the end of the journey with “lalangue” [«lalangue»], which it would not be abusive to break down into lallations language of desire for/of the mother, even if in the Name of the Father [Nom du Père]. There ought to be more viable solutions than this matricide to which the Lacanian problematic of the Phallus would invite us.
¶ 38
Bion, explicitly, and Winnicott, implicitly, derive from Melanie Klein. And it is really with her that there resides an ambiguity — no less great than with Anna Freud — as concerns the status of the child. No one more than Melanie Klein has endowed the child with a structure of categorical thought [structure de pensée catégorielle], in describing a baby who, although absolutely mythical, sometimes resonates with truthful accents, in adults in search of their tragic childhoods. And no one has been more stubborn in upholding the paradox of trying to legitimize this mythic child as the real child, even claiming to chronologically date the Paranoid-Schizoid, Depressive, and Oedipal positions. For having tried to think with Freud, she could not bear the parricide which she carried out against her will. In offering this chronological point of view, from which Freud never freed himself, she sought to avoid breaking ties with the persistent realism in Freudian thought.
¶ 39
Bion and Winnicott, each in his own way, have modified the Kleinian model. But they don’t do so in the name of chronological realism. Bion is careful not to frame his “grid” temporally, and Winnicott, although he retains a fairly linear conception of time, does not give very precise temporal markers. He does not disdain observation, but he is, I daresay, very indirect.
¶ 40
How does he do it? In his article, “"The observation of infants in a set situation” (1941) {40.1}, Winnicott’s eye is much less that of the “direct observers” but that of Freud watching his grandson play with a spool. There are, moreover, between the two works, obvious anastomoses [surgical connection between two structures]. If the description is meticulous, the identification of the psychoanalyst with the baby abundantly compensates for the banal nature of the facts described. It is remarkable that Winnicott doesn’t behave as a passive observer, retreating from the situation, but makes interventions by his own participation, by attempting to insert the spatula into the child’s mouth. The child is not observed in isolation, but together with the mother. One can make the same remarks about another work on “the string” {40.2} regarding the metapsychological conclusions that Winnicott draws from it. This is even more true in the more common study of the behavior of the child, the investment in the transitional object, crucial observation (like the experience of the same name) for describing a group of transitional phenomena taking place in a field whose heuristic value opens onto a theory of symbolism and the area of culture. The creation of these new concepts owes itself to Winnicott’s freedom, and to his bias toward getting himself involved in the situation, to the calculated risk of introducing one’s own unconscious through the “squiggle” game {40.3}.
¶ 40.1
Reprinted in De la pédiatrie à la psychoanalyse, chap. XXI, p. 269, Ed. Payot, trans. J.
Kalmanovitch: The translation of “set situation” by established situation does not render the implicit conceptual reference. “Set situation” evokes the “analytical setting, generally translated in French by «le cadre»
¶ 40.2
Op. cit p. 316
¶ 40.3
Presented at length in the Therapeutic Consultations, but described in 1953; cf. “Respect for the symptom in pediatrics”, in From psychiatry to psychoanalysis, chap. XXII
¶ 41
However, Winnicott only gives the “squiggle” technique a limited value. It serves to establish contact, by playing with the meeting of the child’s preconscious with the preconscious of the analyst. The highlight of the therapeutic consultation will remain the moment when the child can report a dream which now says something about the unconscious; a dream which could not have been approached without intrusion, if these preliminaries had not facilitated access. This apparently incidental position is crucial in the implicit distinction made by Winnicott between squiggle and dream. The squiggle is a crossed and reciprocal game of spontaneous and immediate projections involving a minimum of psychic work. The dream is just the opposite. {41.1}
Absence only takes on meaning as the time of psychic elaboration. It is the working time of the unconscious. To know this work — after the fact [après-coup] — one must wait for the projection, or the reprojection of the formations of the unconscious.
¶ 41.1
Melanie Klein herself does not seem in the Psychoanalysis of children to make any structural difference between instincts, unconscious fantasy, playing, and dreaming. See op. cit. p. 23, where the relation of a dream of Trude (3 years and 9 months old) is not the subject of any particular comment regarding its transferential value in terms of psychic functioning. Melanie Klein appears particularly preoccupied here —surprisingly — with the child’s relationship to reality.
¶ 42
Bion and WInnicott both have in common an understanding of the child in relation to the adult — starting from the analysis of psychotics for Bion, and borderlines for Winnicott. The child furnishes a retrospective theory of the psychopathology of adults. {42.1}
¶ 42.1
It’s a shame that Lacan was unable to follow the same path due to the distortions he has introduced to the analytic framework. These distortions which the neurotic can accept — or even masochistically call for — are intolerable to borderline cases or to psychotics who react to them very brutally by breaking the frame of the analysis, when they cannot constitute an “analytic false self,” which is often the case.
¶ 43
“For an analytic influence to be possible,” writes Freud in his preference to Aichorn’s Jeunesse à l’abandon, “very precise conditions are required which can be summarized by the expression ‘analytic situation’; it requires the development of certain psychic structures and a particular attitude toward the analyst. When these structures are lacking — as in the case of children [...] — something other than analysis must be used.” What the child is missing that bars the “analytic situation,” well, the lacks the development of certain psychic structures. This in fact means that their emergence allows us to better understand where these structures lie in germ, and not the opposite. Freud does not fallow the path which consists in going from the simple to the complex, but thinks that only the analysis of the complex permits us to see the hidden complexity [complexité cachée] of that which appears in a state of pseudo-simplicity. It is through the advent of the Ego that we can subsequently infer the place where “the Id Was” and not the opposite [reversal of Freud’s slogan “where Id was, Ego shall be.”].
¶ 44
All of this poses the problem of construction in analysis. Following S. Viderman, we have learned to question the validity of our reconstructions by conceiving of them as constructions after the fact [après-coup] {41.1}, this does not invalidate our theories. The question is, “What do we imagine ourselves to construct?” We are necessarily led to a discussion in the terms defined by Anna Freud: is the “real” child the one constructed, or reconstructed, in psychoanalysis? We will respond unequivocally: no. But it will be to affirm in reply that the role of psychoanalysis is not to reconstruct the real child. Rather than the mythical child, the mythical childhood of a real child who, himself, is the object of the psychoanalysis of children. I therefore contrast the true child of psychoanalysis — in the sense that Freud spoke of historical truth — to the real child of psychology. Above them, the child of material truth can only be the conjunction between the real child of psychology and the true child of psychoanalysis.
¶ 41.1
La Construction de l’espace analytique, Denoël, 1970. The author goes further since, in his eyes, it is extemporaneously in the situation that what has never previously been comes into existence.
¶ 45
It is not only psychoanalysis which speaks of the true child. Myths tell us much about him, and novels too. Who among us does not feel that there is more truth in Marcel Proust’s account of the bedtime kiss than in the mass of direct observations with scientific claims? Who cannot see that there is a greater proximity between the infantile universe of Winnicott and that of Proust than between the thought of Winnicott and that of Spitz, for example? {45.1}
¶ 45.1
We still ought to qualify this. Alongside his observations — close to those of Piaget — Spitz was able to give free rein to the best of analytical inspirations in a different part of his thought “The primitive cavity.”
¶ 46
When Winnicott endeavors to represent the thoughts of children, he can only resort to paradox, which makes him a sort of Lewis Carroll of psychoanalysis. And when Bion, in his turn, gives us his conception of the child, he recognizes in him attributes relevant to philosophy, modern mathematics, and logical thought. We see nothing here of the model of a digestive tube dear to pediatricians, even one endowed with an elementary intelligence which Piaget calls “sensorimotor.”
¶ 47
Whatever one does, the model of the child in psychoanalysis will be and remain of the order of an indispensable myth of ontogeny, more than of ontogenesis. And it is good that we can then apply to the psychoanalyst of children the anecdote of the man who, searching for his keys under a street lamp, when he has lost them on the other side of the street, that at least he is looking for it where he can see more clearly!
¶ 48
We must repeat Freud’s inaugural gesture with regard to the child. Starting from the clinic of neurosis, he discovers the unconscious, in the open air. It recaptures, for Fliess, a reluctant “scientist,” the elements of a theory which makes it possible to account for the totality of the visible; it is the Sketch and its failure. Freud then understands that he wants to see things too clearly. He locks himself in the nocturnal world of dreams. He analyzes the dream, after having had it, after having been its hero: a spectator of the dream, in fact blind to what he is doing there. Indirectly, he returns to the dream through the memory he keeps of it. He breaks it into pieces, searches for the day residues, the latent thoughts, and engages through associations in the reconstitution of the dream work, which allows him to uncover what is absent in the dream [l’absent du rêve] : the infantile desire reactivated by transference to an actual scene. The fantasy of desire is then found.
¶ 49
With the model of the dream, we can construct a model more general than where childhood fits. This model is multi-temporal and discontinuous.
— There is something which is organized, the perceptual-fantasmic complex. One sees that I combine perception and fantasy simultaneously, with one masking the other. This ensemble is organized. It has a meaning, and the meaning is conscious, and the unconscious meaning of the fantasy is hidden, but active.
— The work of the negative undoes this organization. Here we find taking place all the modes of negativity described by Freud under the category of repression, but where we distinguish today repression, negation, denial, disavowal, foreclosure, the list is never closed, investigation leaves the field open.
— The effect of this work of the negative is to constitute an other positivity: that of the repressed-unconscious, which is a structured organization, but diversely structured according to the prevalent mode of negativity in process (repression, denial, disavowal, etc.).
— The unconscious organization makes its return to the organized one form which we had departed — and which is no longer the same — since time has passed. Then begins the fight to keep it in an unconscious state. When the breakthrough has succeeded after disguise, the meaning of the organization is disorganized in order to make way for the retrospective meaning [sens après-coup] which modifies the order of operations. To open again the conflict between the organization of Ego and the organization of the Unconscious, which represents a disorganization of drives and the compromises which are illustrated by various clinical illustrations.
¶ 50
We are well aware here of merely recalling classical notions, but it is precisely to underline this consistent hard core of Freudian theory, which is his basic model for the dream, for fantasy, for the symptom, for transference, and for the child. Because this model continues to function throughout life. This means that the diachronic point of view can only be subordinated to the structural perspective. Open structures, structures which can be modified by chance within certain limits, but which remain unchanged in their constitution. For the sake of schematization, we have excluded from our description the role of the object. Reintroducing it would only complicate the schema, in one sense above all: namely that the other has the same structure, at a different level of functioning.
¶ 51
When at last, at the end of the construction of his theory, Freud makes his attempt on infantile sexuality, he doesn’t observe it, or he doesn’t only observe it, he constructs at the same time the hypotheses of the unobservable: the support for example which no observation would permit us to deduce but which thought permits us to construct. And above all he introduces an essential discontinuity in human sexuality, present from its very origins — repressed or rendered latent and then reborn in full flower. Life-death (apparent) — rebirth. This is the model which must be kept in mind for the child-model to avoid making him a model child. The child’s love, which is as the parents say, the love which constitutes an essential element of survival. For him to live and not merely survive, it is necessary that he cease to be the model child and know the forbidden nature and ends of his love. He will have to know the object of his hate and transform this primordial “hainamoration” (Lacan) to turn elsewhere, not only toward other objects but towards other object relations. That is always the difficulty of being human.
André Green