The Baby and the Drive

Couvert reads Freudian drive theory through Lacan and places the drive at the centre of the first year of psychic life. She treats the newborn as already a subject, not a bundle of reflexes, and follows the pathways the drive lays down from the earliest days. Four fields organise the account: orality, specularity, invocation, and touch. Each is activated across the first year, and each can stall or misfire.

The clinical material comes from parent-baby units and hospital wards, including work with premature and very young infants alongside their parents. Couvert shows how attending to the activation of the drive reorients observation at the cot and in the consulting room, giving the clinician a way to read early signs of difficulty before they harden. The result is a compact framework for identifying where a drive field has not opened and for intervening with the infant and the parental couple.