Truth from genetic illusion: the transference and the fate of the infantile neurosis.

I have attempted to show that the relative decline of genetic interpretation and reconstruction in modern analysis is a result of historical and methodological problems built into an enduring and developmentally restricted model of the infantile neurosis which has descended more or less intact into our time, a model still parochialized to the phallic-oedipal period and its prototypic oedipal conflict. Mounting direct evidences from both longitudinal developmental studies and child analyses, as well as from the more indirect evidences inferred from the genetic reconstructions of adult analyses, all argue for a developmental reconsideration of infantile neurosis to include preoedipal determinants. I have also asked that we include a measure of postoedipal determinancy as well in any such reconsideration, insofar as latency is the developmental condition for the usual resolution of the infantile neurosis. It must be emphasized that to argue for preoedipal determinancy is to say that problems with early object relatedness and early narcissistic pathology deform the oedipal conflict and its phase-adequate resolution. It does not suggest that narcissistic conflict can replace an oedipal one as the organizing conflict of the infantile neurosis during the phallic-oedipal period. The continuing parochialization of the infantile neurosis to the phallic-oedipal period has been perpetuated in great part by a technical legacy which has tended to restrict reconstructions of the infantile neurosis to the more discursively recoverable libidinal events of that period, and to exclude its preoedipal and aggressive determinants which are more apt to be expressed through the nondiscursive modes of the transference through its acts and self states.