ABSTRACT
Late in his career, Freud put forward two hypotheses that have given rise to an immense body of research, greatly lengthening our perspective on early infancy. First, in 1930, in the opening chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, he asserted that the baby only gradually separates a self from the nurturing world around it. That slow differentiation provided the basis for all situations in later life in which the boundaries between self and other blur or dissolve entirely: mysticism, love, imaginations, or (I would add) the whole process of DEFTing.
