The Infantile in Psychoanalytic Practice Today demonstrates the concept of the Infantile, first proposed almost a quarter of a century ago, and the ways in which it has become an indispensable tool in contemporary psychoanalytic clinical practice.
As a “concept of the third type”, the Infantile makes the “links-between-the-links” woven into the transference/countertransference functional and effective with patients of all ages, and is related to the double helix between infant neurosis and transference neurosis as revealed by Freud. The author proposes the Infantile as a key concept in the psychic organization of every human being, as the unconscious internal space that includes both the repressed elements of the past and the constantly renewed expressions of the drives. As a unique and dynamic configuration for each person, the book explores the way this relates to others, to the environment, and also to the individual’s own psychic contents and movements.
This eagerly awaited English edition includes two new chapters, filling a gap in the psychoanalytic library. As a concept with international scope, these writings on the Infantile will be essential reading for psychoanalysts working today and all those interested in the history of psychoanalysis.
1. The Infantile in the analytic relationship 2. Hans and Sigi: sexual theories as defences against the discovery of infantile sexuality 3. The guilt of the child’s desire 4. The sources of projective identification 5. The depressive position and the Oedipal complex 6. A stroll in the preconscious 7. The unknown object of the transference 8. Leonardo and Sigmund: love, hate and knowledge 9. The adult analyst’s countertransference in the light of the transference of the child in analysis 10. Concerning Don Giovanni’s women: some aspects of female auto-erotism 11. Between the tree and the bark: the psychotherapist in institutions 12. Pregenitality and the primal scene or the fantasized fate of the digestive tract 13. Sexual life and identificatory reorganizations in adolescence 14. The cost of pubertal transformations 15. Child and adolescent psychoanalysis 16. Conclusion
Biography
Florence Guignard is a Franco-Swiss psychoanalyst and honorary full member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP), as well as a training member in child and adolescent psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She is the author of numerous books, including Psychoanalytic Concepts and Technique in Development: Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience and Physics (Routledge).
"As with so much else from French psychoanalysis, it acts as a yeast to ferment the metap>sychology that has formed and informed us all, over the years. The level of thinking mixes classical Freud with much that is contemporary from André Green and from Klei>nians in the mid-twentieth Century.[...] This is a book which has relevance that spans from child analysis and psychotherapy to adult psychoanalytic practice, to work with couples and families, and includes an interesting chapter on psychodynamic splitting in institutions, and moreover a specific relevance perhaps for the budding discipline of parent-infant psychotherapy."
-Bob Hinshelwood, Infant Observation
