ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which the child has been conceptualised by considering how he has been spoken of and written about through the ages. A man’s “age” was a scientific category of the same order as weight or speed for our contemporaries; it formed part of a system of physical description and explanation which went back to the Ionian philosophers of the sixth century BC. Maternal new sentiment for the child was also a new sentiment between members of the family, most particularly of that between the mother and the child. The very idea, or ideal, of the modern family and society is the modality of a repression, a repression that is the foundation stone of the contemporary family. Love and desire must be an added ingredient, in addition to any biological and developmental definition of the child.
