Understanding of Its Caretaker’s Affective Gestures by the Young Infant Is the Basis of a Theory of Body

Abstract

Understanding people begins with the understanding of the infant-directed actions of the primary caretaker. The infant is cuddled and handled, thus acquiring an affective experience of its mother’s body. We asked the mothers of a hundred 2.5- to 5.5-month-old infants whether infants reacted in an understandable way to the mother’s gestures and when the mother had first noticed this. From the age of 3 to 4 months, infants’ reactions suggest they “understand” these gestures. The degree of understanding decreases depending on whether gestures are infant-directed, or only infant-related, and on whether simple or complex motor responses or more abstract ones are involved. Here we propose the concept of a Theory of Body (ToB), the understanding of the caretaker’s bodily behavior, arguing that ToB is a neuropsychological construct. ToB is more than mere mechanistic understanding: gestures are affect-attuned—in psychoanalytic terms they have a libidinal charge—and induce emotional states. As the mother handles the infant, targeting the entire body as an erogenous zone, ToB becomes part of the body image, Freud’s körperliches Ich. A ToB harbors internalized maternal libidinous energy, constituting infantile sexuality. Feeling, understanding, and unconscious imprinting of the mother’s libidinal investment means that ToB is also a neuropsychoanalytic construct