ABSTRACT
J. Lacan delineated the paradigmatic developmental and social anxieties in three complexes: weaning/separation, intrusion/sibling rivalry, and Oedipus. He stressed the originary traumatic "prematurity of birth" that inserts us as infants into a pre-conceived symbolic matrix of signifiers, a realm of inconceivable fantasies and ill-conceived jouissance. If a therapeutic alliance cannot be established with the parents, the analysis risks being prematurely ended or even perverted. The analyst must bear in mind that parents who present their child for psychoanalysis confront a narcissistic wounding. The modern scientific discourses—of "assisted", even imperative, reproduction; of psychiatric models of deficit—amplify this countertransference by identifying the child as object of narcissistic investment and gratification. A separate discourse requires to be mobilised within the symbolic transference with the child whose desire to speak, may speak of desire. Real separation in adolescence is the traumatic sexual re-awakening of puberty.
