Looking Back—and Forward—at The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

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I wish to thank Sam Abrams and Rona Knight for their many helpful comments in response to an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

Salomonsson argues that from birth onward (if not earlier), infants actively create mental representations—he calls them primal representations— of their experiences. These primal representations are embedded in the infants’ affects as well as in their patterns of interaction with the world around them (both inanimate and interpersonal) and develop within a flow of experience that makes sense to the infant (and is experienced as pleasurable)— or that doesn't (and thus creates a wordless anxiety).

Surprisingly, Greenacre avoids any reference to Otto Rank's (1924) speculations regarding the psychological impact of the experience of birth.

Glover also omits the fact that Schmideberg was his analysand—not something that could be shared publically but certainly suggestive of a complicated relationship between analyst and analysand. He also does not mention that Schmideberg's first analyst, when she was still a child, was her mother, Melanie Klein.

This brings to mind Charcot's famous bon mot, quoted by Freud in his translation of Charcot's lectures: “La théorie, c'est bon, mais ça n'empêche pas d'exister” (Theory is nice, but it doesn't trump facts.).

”The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology” (S. Freud, 1933, p. 95).

Bertram Lewin's essay on Bateson and Mead's (1942) Balinese Character, which appears later in volume 1, is another example of this kind of thinking.

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Notes on contributors

Paul M. Brinich

Paul Brinich is a retired Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychoanalyst. A Clinical Professor (Emeritus) in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he also has served on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas. He is a past President of both the North Carolina Psychoanalytic Society and the Association for Child Psychoanalysis.