Thinking through the Hungry Baby

Abstract

Freud's metapsychological paradigm and his conception of the neonate were closely linked. The vignette of the “hungry baby” epitomizes Freud's pain-centered, pragmatic understanding of primary motivational forces. Within the range of mainstream psychoanalytic theory, this point of view has remained essential, although in recent decades it has been supplemented in important ways by a more object-centered, moral perspective on character development. But psychoanalysis still lacks a positive metapsychological formulation of pleasure as a motivation in its own right. This paper explores the problem in the light of recent infant research and of Hartmann's systematic reflections on metapsychology.