ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a polylogue between F. Dolto, M. Klein, and Jacques Lacan regarding their theories on early infancy. Dolto's invention of bringing the psychoanalyst to the street entailed quite a shift of the analyst's position when working with the unconscious. While Klein sees the breast as the object par excellence, both Lacan and Dolto see the new-born as already marked by an original coexistence in utero with the mother, whose placenta was the source of nourishment and pleasure. Lacan, in his 1938 text on family complexes contemplated the Oedipus complex in sociohistorical terms, and already envisaged the social decline of the paternal Imago with the advent of the nuclear family, from which today's family types derive: single parents, blended and step-families, same sex parents. Lacan came close to this notion when he identified the mainspring of psychoanalysis in the "analytical act".
