This paper discusses psychoanalytic practice with babies based on treatment carried out with pre-term babies and their families during their stay in the intensive care unit at a public hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Taking Freud’s concept of the infant’s structural dependence on others as a point of reference, it discusses the different concepts of time in the construction of the baby’s subjectivity, including the parents’ unconscious fantasies and narcissistic investment in the yet unborn baby, the relationship between the baby and maternal holding (Winnicott), and traumatic, abrupt timing related to prematurity.
Psychoanalytic practice; pre-term babies; subject’s constitution; early intervention