ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the ways of seeing and role of vision in the earliest stages of a child's development, and its origin starting from the object-mother in relation to two functions. The importance of the impact of maternal holding on the emotional growth of the infant would be disputed by very few psychoanalysts. However, the significance to psychoanalytic theory of D. W. Winnicott's concept of holding is far more subtle than this broad statement would suggest. W. R. Bion discussed the "container-contained" relationship in terms of a maternal process that transforms the infant's raw experiences into a more manageable and contained form. Winnicott's holding and Bion's container-contained represent different analytic vertices from which to view the same analytic experience. Holding is concerned primarily with being and its relationship to time; the container-contained is centrally concerned with the processing of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. For J. Lacan, the narcissistic conflict dominates the child's mirroring experience, seen also through the mother's gaze that supports it.
