ABSTRACT
Here the author discusses a psychic agency shared by mother and infans: the transitional psychic matrix, which can re-establish interrupted harmonious interplay. This matrix originates in an amodal (intrauterine) sensory matrix set to the harmonics of rhythms compatible with life. It provides a space in which to resolve contradictions, and makes it possible to bear discontinuity.
Ego formation relying on this agency provides the foundation of self-esteem, and even more importantly, it also establishes the possibility of love of the other in oneself, that is, of transference and social relation.
Réfabert goes on to say that if the mother/infant rhythm is disrupted, a foundation for psychic life is lacking. The child who is left to constitute his psychic being alone, who is forced to become the only guardian watching over his psychic life, uses a fetish as a replacement of the lost and forgotten support that was previously his. The fetish is the concrete substitute for a shared agency, which takes up residence in an object.
