ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic treatment proposes to reconstruct the past, erasing the lacunae of early childhood memories, which are the product of repression. It achieves this by lifting the resistances and resolving the transference through the analysis of dreams, parapraxes and screen memories, no less than the analysis of symptoms and of character. The theories Sigmund Freud formulated, with this method, on human development, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex were strongly supported not only by the results of treatment but also by the psychoanalysis of children, where these same phenomena can be seen in status nascendi. The chapter calls early development the pre-verbal phase, where there is no preconscious registering of memories, and which covers approximately the pre-oedipal stage described by Freud and by Ruth Mack Brunswick. It distinguishes it from infantile development, which corresponds to the Oedipus complex, discovered by Freud, at between 3 and 5 years of age.
