ABSTRACT
Historians of psychoanalysis have long and rightly distinguished the Independent tradition by its concern with the impact of the infant's environment, and especially of the earliest environment of maternal care, on his psychic development. The often explicit corollary of this resolution is the suggestion that inferences about early infancy from the adult psychoanalytic setup are poor in reliability relative to the findings of observation in situ of the mother–infant set-up. This chapter draws out some of the implications of this nachträglich temporality for the understanding of Independent thinking and the place of early infancy within it. The Nachträglichkeit or 'afterwardsness' of infancy is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the necessary and paradoxically productive condition of psychoanalytic thinking. Christopher Bollas' book was a revelation in this context, its vivid and layered portrait of the earliest forms of psychic life and the mother–infant relation rooted in a dense and psychoanalytically specific concep-tuality.
