[Reflections on maternal techniques and the rearing of infants and young children in the Ivory Coast]

The core hypothesis of the authors is that certain particularities of the traditional bringing up of infants and young children in Côte-d'Ivoire modify its affective experiencing and therefore its libidinal organization. Ivorian breast feeding is extremely permissive, subjected to the sole wish of the child, traditionally until the age of 2. It maintains a belated mother-infant fusion in the context of intense oral satisfaction. The end of this idyllic fusion state generally is brought about brutally. When it is contemporary to the ending of carrying the child on the back, this milk weaning constitutes a true traumatic experience. The authors suggest that it functions as an "organizor" in the sense of Spitz: interdiction is concerned with access to the maternal body. The child's renouncing of possession of the mother's body thus leads him through replacement to adhere to the socialized and socializing body of the group (age group, siblings group). The main anxiety would be of abandonment as we constantly see in psychiatric clinical experience. Carrying on the back is not only an easy means of transportation of the infants. The fabric pocket which berths the infant since it is born is a privileged place of comfort, of exchange, of maturing and the authors suggest that it functions as a structuring of the body-ego of the infant. They also suggest that so gratifying a technique of back-carrying could lead to a shifting of the erogeneous zone to the body, thus making it apt to express all the richesses of the affective life. Language education is traditionally not the task of the parents but of the grand-parents and of the child community. The latter contributes to the building of a social-ego and of an identity which is defined along ethnical criteria. The enema technique is equally of interest at it is administered since birth and thereon almost daily, thus focusing the infants' interest on an erogeneous zone which in other cultures is less intensely and less early excited. Finally the authors discuss the first forms of socialization of the child after briefly recalling the importance of the lineage to which is attached the notion of the statute. The authors deal first with the social bypassing of opposition and aggression then with the notion of extended family, the roles of fathers, mothers and of the child community.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)