ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an erroneous founding assumption inherited from Freud: namely that the human capacity to bear a paradoxical position between life and death is given to the child naturally, at birth.
Réfabert points out the unfortunate effects of this assumption on psychoanalytic practice. He goes on to argue that in the relation between parent and child, giving the child’s life the necessary support in the form of the trace of death is essential for enabling the infant to establish on his own a limit between inside and outside, in other words, to become a subject.
