ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s ideas are recalled from the foregoing discussion that he had emphasised that the requisite intervention needs to come from a person with experience. The mother as the essential irreplaceable helper for her infant in distress is at the centre of the ideas, outlined in 1894 and in much more detail in Freud's 1895 “Project for a scientific psychology”, which he wrote five years before The Interpretation of Dreams, considered by Freud to mark the beginning of psychoanalysis. This early model goes some way to account for the beginnings of the functions of communication and thinking, rooted in anxiety and its vicissitudes, stemming from the mother’s orientation to, and management of, her infant’s painful mounting inner tension. Before he discovered the psychoanalytic method as a way of access to the unconscious, Freud was concerned to place concept of anxiety at the centre of a theory of development of mind.
