What is to educate a baby? The beginnings of psychic structuring within the school institution

Abstract

Babies' access to early childhood education is, on the one hand, a right of the working mother and, on the other, of the baby and the small child. Such a legal achievement does not imply that clinicians and educators leave aside the question about how the presence-absence is sustained between a mother and a baby so that the transition between maternal and institutional care can represent an extension of bonds and not a break of the first reference (unary trait) that supports the symbolic series of a baby's life. At the same time, it is necessary to qualify the intervention of early childhood education professionals, making it transmissible how in these small daily acts of feeding, hygiene or sleep lulling, often devalued within the culture, the first inscriptions constituting the baby's psyche are at stake. They tie the perceptions that reach him to the symbolic representations offered by those who care for him. For this reason, professionalizing the intervention of early childhood educators does not imply falling into rigid techniques, but rescuing the complexity of the symbolic transmission involved in daily care, in playing with the small child and in the games that constitute a baby as the subject of desire in structuring, underlined in the contributions of the clinic of early stimulation permeated by psychoanalysis.