ABSTRACT
Separation is of course a model experiment for attachment theories. In psychoanalysis, both theory and practice, the question of separation and the question of the object are one and the same. The weekend or vacation time arrives and with it separation, discontinuity. The development of attachment theories has considerably complicated our representation of every young child and his progress. John Bowlby's reasoning very astutely sums up what is at stake. The psychoanalytic literature, he writes, is strewn with attempts to gain an understanding of separation anxiety. Daniel Widlocher speaks of the seduction of the transference that, repeating what did not occur, enables the patient in the best-case scenario to (re)open the mobility of investments and the play of representations. The binary infantile sexuality/attachment enables us to think and to theorize; its application, in the moment, can only impoverish an experience that, for its part, is always confusing.
