Propping the Infant
Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has written a great deal on the concept of “propping” or “leaning-on;” such is his translation of Freud’s notion of infantile attachment (Anlenung—and that Strachey translates as anaclisis, or anaclitic). The Native-American technique of swaddling is a near literal version of this concept in action, in which the infant is wrapped and propped on a decorative cradle-board to be worn as a back-back. It is as if these mothers are wrapping up their babies as protection from the abyss; a practical means to ward off cosmic emptiness. Here in this leaning-on is precisely where the vital and existential needs of the child are mixed with all that love and affection, compounded by fantasy, and thus generating the dynamic excesses of the drive.
