Introduction

Psychoanalytic investigation reaching back into childhood from a later time and contemporary observation of children, combine to indicate to us still other regularly active sources of sexual excitation. The direct observation of children has the disadvantage of working upon data which are easily misunderstandable. As Green and Stern remind us, it was not the first time that they had met in public—arousing the same interest and turbulence—to comment on and to criticize each other's viewpoints on the relevance of baby observation to psychoanalysis. Particularly influential is Lacan's at times brilliant reinterpretation of Freud's concepts such as that of Nachträglichkeit and of Trieb as opposed to instinct, and his polemic attitude towards what he thought was already a behaviouristic, biologistic adaptational and reductionistic psychologization of psychoanalysis, coming from American ego psychology and its scientist empirical ramifications during the 1950s.