Without the notion of the infantile, Psychoanalysis would simply not exist. From the outset of his discovery, Freud took hold of this subject as a sine qua non basis of the task. The Unconscious, that is to say, the repressed part that comes from the infantile, persists throughout the lifespan and it is at the core of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Although psychoanalysts may recognise the infantile part of the Unconscious, it is not an area that is clearly defined. What is the infantile? We may “know” when we have encountered it, but how do we know? Even though the infantile is ubiquitous, it is also forgotten. The subtle devaluation of infantile qualities may serve to disavow feared and subversive infantile attributes. Why must the infantile be repressed? What about infantile sexual theories?
Freud’s discovery of the infantile neurosis has a huge presence in our daily work. The notion of the infantile includes references to the child and the baby in the patient. In addition, it includes the infantile in the analyst. Transference and countertransference can only take place within the impact of the infantile between patient and analyst, regardless of whether we are speaking of child or adult analysis.
Psychoanalysts all over the world have greatly deepened the idea of the infantile, towards including primordial and unrepresented states of the human mind. On the other hand, we can hardly say that contemporary childhood has much to do with that upon which the first psychoanalytic observations were made more than a century ago during Freud’s time. Although main concepts such as infantile sexuality, centrality of the Oedipus complex and infantile neurosis remain unquestionable, we want to investigate whether and how the Infantile has changed in the way it appears in our contemporary analytic practice with our patients.
At the time when psychoanalysis was born, children were growing into a different social world than the one in which we live now. The rapid technological advances they now witness, is just one example. We psychoanalysts are demanded by society to answer questions related to the effects of changes in sexual and gender identity, or in new family configurations. More and more frequently we are involved in working with children and adults in situations of violence, forced migration, and political turmoil, situations often shared with their patients. Are we capable of assimilating and elaborating these vertiginous demands on our work?
We know that it is through psychoanalysis that we can maintain healthy aspects of the infantile alive in us, so that we can play with the imagination, be sensitive to emotion, let ourselves be vulnerable enough to resonate with our patients in our clinical work, be creative in our own field and beyond it, in play, in humour, in inventiveness, in art.
We repress the infantile in ourselves, as we forget our ancestral roots. Is it related to the helplessness experienced in the initial moments of life? Is it our ignorance that we do not tolerate? Is that ignorance a painful injury to our infantile narcissism? Are there the untamed thoughts we had and are ashamed of in our more “civilised” and adaptive beings of today?
What is the price we pay for having lost contact with our rich origins? There are many unexplored avenues still open to us.
In choosing the theme of the infantile: its multiple dimensions we share all these interrogations. The multiple dimensions include psychoanalytic practice in its clinical, technical and developmental issues, the contributions of neurosciences, the influence and impact of social and political changes in the world on our theory and practice, as well as the input of culture and art in the understanding of the infantile in our time.
The IPA is, once again, following Freud’s path, shedding a light on those parts of our experience as humans that are so close to our everyday experience, that we take them for granted. In fact, they remain challenging and mysterious.
Meet the Vancouver Congress Programme Committee (from left - right):Irene Cairo (Co-Chair, North America), Sergio Nick (Ex-officio IPA Vice-President), Gennaro Saragnano (Co-Chair, Europe), Clara Nemas de Urman (Co-Chair, Latin America), Jorge Bruce (Committee Chair), Kristin Whiteside (IPSO Vice-President for North America)