ABSTRACT
There are significant differences between a cognitivist theory and a psychoanalytic one. The former stresses the symmetry between the mothering environment and the infant and sees this couple as tending to constitute a homeostatic system. Psychoanalysts insist on the dissymmetry between the patient and the analyst or the infant and its carers, on the primary dependency and original helplessness–the term is Freud’s–to which the analysand regresses as an effect of the process of psychoanalysis. The development of the other senses is referred back to the skin, the “originary” phantasised surface—in the sense of “originary” used by Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier, as the precursor and foundation of primary psychical functioning. The double feedback observed by Brazelton results, in the authors' opinion, in an interface, represented as a skin common to the mother and the child, with the mother on one side and the child on the other.
