ABSTRACT
With all the passion that she put into trying to imagine and think about the origins of mental life, Piera Aulagnier put forward a theory that she continued to develop over time; we can, therefore, try to grasp it from a historical point of view. Based on that acknowledgement of the dissociation between what the analyst experiences and psychoanalytical theory, she put forward the hypothesis of a split: analysts assume that their knowledge of mental life should make it possible to act on the phenomenon. The various aspects of metabolisation—transforma-tion, change, assimilation, excretion, energy expenditure, absorption, integration—come into play, in both modelisation and metaphorisa-tion. It is important to point out that "borrowing" is not the same thing as Freud's concept of anaclisis. In her definition of the "anticipated mother", Aulagnier makes no reference to a signifier, but to emotion, which, as she emphasises, has no particular place in psychoanalytical terminology.
