The Origin of the Child’s Words Papa and Mama: Some Observations on the Different Stages of Language Development

Written in Geneva, the paper sets the psychological literature on the stages of speech development, from Kussmaul and Gutzmann to Stern and Sully, against a psychoanalytic account of the first words. Gutzmann had explained the likeness of the words for father and mother across languages by the lips and tongue having been prepared for articulation by sucking; Spielrein derives the infant’s “mö-mö” from sucking itself. The baby laid down after a feed cannot at once stop the impulse it needed for sucking, and the continued movements, which repeat the sensations of the feed, let it relive the pleasure of nursing. This needs no assumption of a deliberate hallucinatory wish-fulfilment: at first the word did not name an action but was the action itself. Her diary of her daughter at ten months, who said “Papa” when content and “Mama” when unhappy or wanting something, observations reported by Stern and others and confirmed by several mothers and by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, lead her to trace the two words to different phases of nursing: “mö” reproduces the sucking most faithfully, as the mouth grips the nipple when hunger grows, while “pö-pö” or “bö-bö” belongs to the sated infant playing with the breast, letting it go and catching it again.