[Mother-infant relations: beginnings of the psychological structure]

The practice of joint mother-infant psychotherapy is a good setting for studying parental contributions to the formation of the child's psychic structure. Parents organize their infant's experience in terms of their own cognitive and emotional predilections. Through projective identifications they lend meaning to the infant's behaviors and attitudes. We are presenting two cases where one can witness the production of shared interactive scenarios between mother and child. In the first case a mother constantly interferes with the alimentary initiative of her baby, as if she wanted to control the baby's impulsive oral demands. In the second case mother defines the child's solicitations in terms of aggressive intentions. Those two cases are used as illustration of the powerfully impact of maternal predilection and aversion onto the development of expressions and controls in the infant. The general topic of this paper is communication between mother and infant and the transmission of values and attitudes through behaviors from mothers to babies.