Yes, you might call this the psychoanalytic idea of transference. However, the psychoanalytic understanding of infant psychology, and the infant-mother relationship, is radically different from the one presented here. Furthermore, Freud developed his ideas in this area by a very indirect method, and before any real scientific investigation had been done. In recent decades a great deal of research has now been done, and it has made clear the Freudian view was quite mistaken.
Really? I've been seeing evidence that, although Freud's concrete causal theories aren't correct (penis envy, etc), his metapsychology and structural models (particularly the work that surrounds his unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology, a sort of proto-structuralist view of psyche) are being vindicated via neuropsychology. See https://headbirths.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/friston-on-freud...
Also, plenty of psychoanalysts were aware of the failures in Freud's theories, so you end up with theorists like Klein and Lacan who correct them while still maintaining an overall consistent model, which is _the_ thing that modern psychology lacks.
The question here is infant and child psychology, and for that you need direct observation. Freud didn't do this, and he came up with an infant psychology that in key ways was simply wrong. The same is true of Lacan. Klein was a step in the direction.
Part of the problem is that the needed scientific methods did not exist. But in recent decades they have been developed, and so we now have a vastly better understanding. And that in turn has enormous implications for psychotherapy.
As to neuropsychology, I am not familiar with that field, so my question is what does it have to say about infant psychology.
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