ABSTRACT
Sexuality and the infantile factor play as great a part in the history and structure of child psychoanalysis itself, as they do in the clinical history of each child. Usually, time is considered to be a linear dimension, and history, and consequently development, is taken as a type of process. The developmental notion proposes a progressive unfolding of abilities and functions. The temporality that is determining in the structure of childhood, however, is of a different order. Childhood as remembered is a childhood of desire in which the child takes up a place as a sexual being. The unquestioning endeavour to understand the child through a notion of ages and stages has led most streams of psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud to pursue a developmental line. Freud’s method of producing an aetiological formulation, to endeavour to locate a cause in the past, is a very commonplace one, and, contrary to the view often held, has nothing to do with psychoanalysis.
