ABSTRACT
My argument in this paper is that there is a methodological dilemma connected with psychoanalytical knowledge of infants. In the field of psychoanalysis with somewhat older children and adults there is a continuous, mutual exchange going on between how we understand the course of events in the clinical setting and psychoanalytical theory; fruitful for both clinical work and theory. This fruitful intercourse is missing as a base for knowledge of infants, as the observations are not based on a psychoanalytical clinical setting. Psychoanalytical models of early infantile mental functioning are mainly constructions based on psychoanalysis with somewhat older children and adults according to ‘the method of working backwards from a developmental end-point’ (Harrison, 2003, p. 1382). We are left with uncertainty concerning the actual infant’s infantile mental functioning, as the more adult mental functions – for example, verbal capacity and secondary repression – develop as early as at two or three years of age and then overshadow the infantile mental functioning.
