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thinkers, a one-person mind is an achievement, a fluctuating one, which may be lost under internal or external stress. Independently and virtually simultaneously, Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott both formulated the primary human dilemma: in order to become someone, each subject must pass through another, a real, conflicted, individual, other. Both authors wrote of the mirroring function of the object, in Winnicott’s (1967) case as an opportunity to find reflected back one’s “true” self whereas for Lacan (1949/1977; 1966) this mirroring was the beginning of a lifelong alienation, in which the ego, craving to be the object of the other’s desire, takes other forms to be itself. A former disciple of Lacan, Piera Aulagnier (2001[1975]) deepened understanding of the intimate role of the early caretaker in the infant’s activity of representation . She pointed out that for the infans there is an inevitable ‘violence of anticipation’ in the ‘spoken shadow’ of maternal discourse. She writes: “It is thus the mother’s discourse that is the agent responsible for the effect of anticipation, imposed on the infant, from whom a response is expected that it is not in his power to give. It is also this discourse that illustrates … the concept of ‘ primary violence ” (2001/1975, p. 11). Moreover, she emphasized the central role of the deferred action of the naming of affect (deferred because it is occurring after the mother has observed the child’s response and before the child knows how to speak of it himself), which by designating the child’s relation to others cathected by him “identifies and constitutes the I” (ibid., (p 97). For Winnicott , the object (conflicted subject in her own right) also plays an essential role in the birth of a functioning psychic apparatus, one capable of distinguishing fantasy from perception. The object manages this transformation and construction through two main kinds of interactions with the infant. There is firstly the “found-created” of the empathetically timed maternal offering, which appears, just when the baby needs it. Then, the ‘object’s survival’ to being ‘used’ as the object of drives helps the baby differentiate his wishes from external reality. Winnicott (1960 b, p. 141) claims that for the infant instinctual impulses and affects are as foreign to the ego as a thunderclap. It is through a successful negotiation of the two categories of interaction of ‘ created-found ’ and the ‘ use of the objec t’ (1953, 1969) that the child gradually subjectifies drive and distinguishes it from environmental forces. Thus the particular character of the “meeting” between the child’s spontaneous object-directed thrust and the parent’s “response” can be said to literally mold the subject’s intrapsychic experience . Before the drive can be felt as a part of oneself, it must arc through the external other’s response; in this manner, rather than simply “inborn”, for Winnicott drive is essentially “constructed” in the relationship with the other. In Andre Green’s (1997) view, the drive is the matrix of the subject, as in Freudian theory ego arose from the interaction/clash between the drives and the external world. Green added to Winnicottian concept of ‘optimal (maternal) presence’ his conceptualization of ‘ optimal absence ’ as furthering the processes of symbolization and representation. (Green’s dialectic of the intrapsychic and the intersubjective will be specified below.)
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