The objective of this article is to discuss the hypothesis of a pre-verbal causality of psychic reality established in body-to-body contact between mother and child. The gaze is the object that intermediates this relationship. It is the cause of desire, institutes a lack and, like the word, leaves marks on the child. It constitutes a pre-verbal object and, as such, pre-announces what is verbal. That is, it creates the “condition of.” The mother’s perception of her baby is always a supposition subject to mistakes, lies and denials. The play of gazes and glances between mother and child that is operated in this field installs a primordial Verleugnung that produces the illusion of union, a supposition of completeness, of a continuous body denying the experience of separation that installs the discontinuity between the two and, therefore, alterity.
Primordial other; Verleugnung; mother’s gaze/glance; the absent other