Freud’s understanding of the importance of infancy in psychical constitution is fundamental in psychoanalysis, leading us to consider that the notion of infantile, in metapsychology, assumes the statute of a concept. This essay proposes to research the concept of infantile in Freud. In order to point out the precocity of the appearance of the concept in psychoanalysis, the initial moments of Freud’s works are favored. Some texts written after the pre-psychoanalytic publications, such as "The Interpretation of Dreams" and "The three essays on the theory of sexuality", will also be analyzed, so as to point out the initial development of the concept of infantile in metapsychology and in psychoanalytic work.
infancy; infantile; psychical constitution