DEVELOPMENTAL DIMENSION

The human brain never develops in isolation.

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From the very first moments of life, he grows up in a world already populated by other human beings. The looks, the voices, the physical proximity, the responses given to the child's needs - but also sometimes their absence, their unpredictability or their discontinuity - contribute to the progressive organization of the nervous system.

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Development does not take place alongside presence. It unfolds within presence.

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This idea leads us to consider attachment, emotional regulation, the feeling of security, the construction of identity and cognitive abilities not as successive acquisitions, but as different expressions of the same fundamental process: the way in which a brain gradually learns to live in a world inhabited by others — and to estimate, with more or less confidence, who it can rely on.

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The developmental dimension of the Presence Brain explores how experiences of presence, absence, availability, or relational unpredictability shape the brain throughout life — from early childhood to the reorganizations made possible by psychotherapy.

 

Articles in this series

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Presence before attachment ✅

What if sensitivity to the presence of others preceded the mechanisms of attachment themselves? A reflection on the earliest developmental foundations of security — before the bond takes shape, before the child can even name someone.

→ Read the article

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Attachment: A Science of Presence (in preparation)

Attachment can be considered the first biological system that allows a child to assess, with varying degrees of certainty, the availability of others. This article explores what attachment theory owes to presence—and what presence owes to attachment.

→ Read the article (in preparation)

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Building oneself in the eyes of others — stories of presence (in preparation)

How do repeated experiences of presence and absence throughout life—nourishing, unpredictable, or traumatic—permanently shape the brain's sensitivity to others? Identity, self-esteem, sense of existence as a subject: an interpretation in terms of presence.

→ Read the article (in preparation)

 

The child deprived of presence — what Bucharest revealed (in preparation)

Children institutionalized in Romanian orphanages have become one of the most documented natural experiments on the effects of early social deprivation. What these extreme situations reveal about the role of presence in the development of the human brain.

→ Read the article (in preparation)