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too much object “presence” paradoxically prevents rather than facilitates the unfolding of the baby’s representational potentiality. Laplanche’s ambitious reformulation of the “foundations of psychoanalysis” (1989) which offers another view of the relationship between object and drive. Laplanche, like Green, has been particularly influential amongst French-speaking Quebec analysts. Laplanche (1993, 1999) criticizes the “Ptolemaic” character of the Freudian vision which placed the individual psyche at the centre of his destiny. Rather, Laplanche claims that the fundamental “anthropological situation” of early childhood is completely decentred by the “priority” of the other, making the little person “Copernician” in her revolution around the adult. The drastic asymmetry between adult and infant emphasized by Laplanche because of its huge consequence for the infant’s psychic structure lies in the fact that the adult is a sexual and speaking being with an unconscious whereas the baby is neither sexual nor able to speak and is not as yet internally divided. Barely intuited by the adult is the triggering of his or hers unconscious infantile sexuality in primary intimacy with the infant body. This unconscious sexuality “contaminates” intimate exchanges with the infant in the form of “enigmatic messages” which the baby does not have the cognitive, emotional, or corporeal means to decode. Such enigmatic messages of unconscious sexuality of the adult create the drive and unconscious fantasy in the form of an internal “pressure for translation” on part of the baby. For Laplanche, this sexuality, enigmatic in nature, is the infantile sexuality discovered by Freud. This sexuality is not innate but an implantation from the real other, though the reality which counts – in a highly critical derivation and reworking of Lacan – is the reality of the “message”, a third reality Laplanche adds to those of the Freudian psychical and material realities. Thus, for Laplanche human sexuality – by which he means sexuality mediated by fantasy – comes from the other and is “other” (foreign to the ego). Another author who has reflected deeply upon the role of the real, individual, caretaker in transforming the psychic apparatus is Reid (2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2015). He and others such as the Botellas (2004, 2007), Brusset (1988, 2005b, 2006, 2013), and Seulin (2015) argue not only that Freu’’s discovery of primary process thought has revealed an entirely unconscious hallucinatory mode of functioning as the dominant human infantile state of mind as it were, but also that the installation of the pleasure-principle at the heart of the psychical apparatus is not a given but a result of pleasure shared by environment and baby around the satisfaction of need. The Freudian ‘state of mind’ as revealed in the “Interpretation of Dreams” is a mind capable of distinguishing representation from perception, wish from external fact. Whereas as Freud observed in 1897 regarding the unconscious, a wish cathected by affect is virtually indistinguishable from a perception. As such the unconscious constantly operates in a potentially traumatic fashion where thought is immediately presumed to mean action. The transformation, or perhaps more accurately, the addition, of a second mode of cognitive functioning inhibiting the first – the secondary process designated by Freud – requires felicitous benevolent intervention from the object. Inadequate holding, reverie, and response from early caretakers have the unfortunate added effect of leaving large swathes of the subject’s unconscious processing at the magical and inherently traumatic level. In constrast when the environment has been good-enough, “reality” itself becomes simultaneously perceptual and
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