Tradition and change in psychoanalytic theory: Querying the infantile

Theory plays a crucial role in clinical choices, group formation, and organizational culture and politics. Theoretical positions seem based on reason and observation, but other motivations are often involved-belonging, recognition, and even concrete rewards, such as referrals and organizational positions. Established ideas can constrain new perspectives and observations that can enhance analytic theory and practice. I query the theory of infantile sexuality, critiquing several different theories' images of infancy: Freud's, Ego Psychology's; Melanie Klein's and Jean Laplanche's. I question both the analogy between infancy, psychic "primitivity," and severe psychopathology (especially psychosis) and the idea that sexuality and aggression are the primary, endogenous motives. Rather than the essential "first causes" from the beginning of life, they are among an array of motives of interest to analysis. None of this precludes the core analytic ideas about the unconscious, primary process, object relations, fantasy, transference, and the salience of the inner world.