ABSTRACT
In Freud’s day, what was repressed, both in the speech of individuals and in collective representations, was sex; this was the external reason (the internal one was his self-analysis) which led the inventor of psychoanalysis to emphasise questions of sexuality. Psychoanalytic research into the psychical effects of maternal deprivation has been carried out by scholars who, before they became psychoanalysts or at the same time, were, became or remained child psychiatrists or paediatricians. Four sets of data have, thus, directed, interrogated and fed into psychoanalytic research on the early genesis and problems of the psychical apparatus. Clinical psychoanalysis has found itself having to introduce new nosological categories, among which that of borderline states is the most sound and commonly applied. Clinical observation of normal human infants had long demonstrated similar phenomena, so Bowlby set out to revise psychoanalytic theory to take these findings into account.
