Dolto shares her infantocentrism with the British, but her child is not a walking-talking Dombey, but, rather, a being-spoken-to and therefore speaking and thinking small person. Donald Winnicott, her rival in this field, famously dismissed her as “too intuitive”; this is incorrect, because, like the object of her research, she is intensely engaged in the process whereby language turns feelings into thoughts. Dolto might be a populist rather than an intellectual in her presentations of her theories, but the child of her observation and of her theory is a thinker whose task of humanization is to have new thoughts. (Location 95)
Klein put infantile phantasies into words; Dolto is stimulating the intelligence even of the foetus. (Location 102)
Dolto’s social-clinical observations became her theory and her theory is the explanation of the process of humanization. Religion, psychoanalysis, and human strivings are tied together in the concept of desire. Desire is shaped by the social prohibitions on it (manifold and repeated “castrations”). Words replace objects, and thus are the medium within which desire circulates. (Location 103)
language is social, both immediately in the present and historically: what your great-grandparents did and what they said about what they did is transmitted down generations, and laterally across different experiences. (Location 109)
Dolto’s baby, even if not yet able to answer, would have understood that the general uncertainty of its experience would have depended on what its Mum or Dad said of what they felt at the times when it was conceived, carried, and born. (Location 112)
for Dolto, desire is not only constituted by what it lacks; it is also a kind of collective unconscious energy, a life-drive, which makes us a generic human subject beyond the specifics of our individual selfhoods. (Location 117)
Dolto, I suggest, is engaged in thinking through the complexities of the baby-mother-humanity nexus that is other than the maternal idealizations/denigrations of phallo- or patro-centrism. (Location 128)
Françoise Dolto’s own work had remained largely untranslated into English and was unknown to the English psychoanalytic community. (Location 139)
She worked as one of the first child analysts, using her highly developed intuition to work with children who might otherwise have been dismissed as untreatable. She was a colleague of Jacques Lacan and was a member of l’Ecole Freudienne de Paris. She lived and worked through another critical time in Paris, that of May 1968, and contributed to educational reform in France. Her broadcasts in France in the 1970s made her a household name, bringing the insights of psychoanalysis to ordinary families. (Location 152)
The human subject is a function of language and, from conception, is a subject of desire. Dolto believed that infants understand much more than is commonly understood, and that infants are in receipt of their family history, which is transmitted unconsciously from generation to generation. (Location 158)
• A series of benign “castrations” is necessary to enable the infant to symbolize the inevitable separations and losses involved in coming into being, (Location 162)
Françoise Dolto developed the idea of the “unconscious image of the body”. She elaborated the use made of the “unconscious image of the body” as the support and agent of the emergence of the subject through language. (Location 164)
She considers the consequences of trans-generational processes, suggesting, for example, that it took three generations to create a psychotic individual. (Location 173)
the analytic work of Françoise Dolto is more significant than ever today, because of its radical subversion of social norms, and because of her insistence on the importance of truthful speech in the service of the recognition and respect for otherness, underpinned by therapeutic conversation pursued outside the agency of any social control. Dolto’s ethic is increasingly relevant in a society that has become highly technical and “object-related”, as a counter to the erosion of the liberal and humanistic values that society claims to espouse. (Location 210)
Central to her ethic was her non-compliance with meaningless regression, in the face of which she showed considerable ferocity. She had an extraordinary capacity to speak to the most regressed, psychotic part of the child, but would only engage with such “malignant” regression in order to get the child back into relationship. (Location 222)
She appears to have been, from her early years, an exceptionally independent spirit with an acute intelligence. (Location 246)
However, lively and communicative as she was, there was always an other-worldly quality to the young Fran-çoise. (Location 256)
Displaying a creative capacity to overturn conventional understanding and an unusually developed compassion for the scapegoat, she defended the integrity of Judas. (Location 258)
from an early age she became interested in the development of communication systems, encouraged by her father. As a child, she was an avid reader of technical journals, from which she taught herself Morse code and how to build a radio receiver. This served as a metaphor for her of how it is that humans can communicate unconsciously, without obvious material means. (Location 265)
Her relationship with her mother was often troubled. Her mother seems to have found her intelligent, irrepressible daughter, with her strange ideas and defiance of what was conventional for girls, incomprehensible. Françoise Marette loved her mother, but despaired at the monstrosity of her expectations. She had compassion for her, for her misogyny bred of a sense of inferiority, for her self-loathing, for her intolerance of her passionate nature that her mother misperceived as sinful. Her mother’s guilt appears to have generated aggression towards herself and towards her children. (Location 270)
Françoise was abandoned, deprived of the life she had known, and immediately succumbed to pneumonia. Her mother responded instinctively to the plight of her infant, holding her to her naked body and loving her back to life. (Location 278)
Françoise Marette resolved as a young girl that she would try to become a médecin d’éducation, a term of her invention that described a doctor who would understand the emotions and the relationships between human beings which underpinned what is expressed in illness. She already sensed that she had been born too early for her ideas to be easily accepted. (Location 281)
Francoise Dolto found solace within the Russian Orthodox faith of her husband. In contrast to Catholicism, which designates the authority of man over woman, the orthodox liturgy establishes the equality of man and woman as subjects before God and the law, because the law of the Orthodox faith is not a law that demands justice, but is a law based in charity. The law, its rituals and institutions, were made for man rather than that man should serve the law. She did not support a church that institutionalized sadomasochism; rather, what she upheld in Christianity was its radical subversion of power, a God who does not judge, who does not blame, but who encourages the overcoming of obstacles which bar the realization of desire. Her spiritual nature led to explorations of different faiths, including Hinduism, and she and her husband were part of a group that met with Swami Siddheswarananda during the war. They had been introduced to the group by Louis Renou, professor of Sanskrit at the Sorbonne, who was an admirer of Françoise Dolto’s work. (Location 513)
The mirror stage, for Lacan, brought with it a sense of narcissistic jubilation, whereas for Françoise Dolto, the mirror stage brought with it the experience of castration and a sense of sadness, of not being the image reflected by the mirror. The mirror, for Françoise Dolto, was a mirror of all the senses, which formed a basis for what was to become her major theoretical contribution, L’Image inconsciente du corps, “a mirror of the being of the subject in the other” (ibid., p. 59). (Location 543)
Meanwhile, in Paris, a schism was opening up in the SPP. The main source of dissension within the organization hinged on Lacan’s unorthodox psychoanalytic practice: specifically, his shortened sessions. Françoise Dolto was also the object of criticism, partly because she allied herself with Lacan, but also because, in her own right, she was a creative non-conformist who had little respect for the rigidity of the rules of the psychoanalytic institution. Françoise Dolto was not a Lacanian, but she recognized the revolutionary nature of Lacan’s ideas. She was impressed by how the analysands of Lacan were able to work effectively with children because Lacan had an acute ear for primitive states within the adult. Lacan, for his part, held Françoise Dolto in esteem and frequently referred to her patients he found too difficult. (Location 547)
The committee of inquiry set up by the IPA, chaired by Winnicott, interviewed Françoise Dolto. Winnicott is said to have commented that he was interested in her work and found her innovative, but he reproached her for her wild creativity and said that “She has too much intuition and not enough method to be a teacher” (Roudinesco, 1986, p. 329). Thus, Françoise Dolto was excluded from the IPA, as was Lacan. It is puzzling as to why Winnicott was so damning of Dolto, especially given that they were both paediatricians working in the same field of primitive psychosomatic disturbance. Perhaps there was an element of rivalry in the decision. It is likely that the commission was suspicious of her association with Lacan; also, that they would not have known what to make of a child analyst without the affiliations that they recognized, to Anna Freud or to Melanie Klein. Perhaps there was an element of machismo and fear in reaction against this clever, outspoken woman who was not afraid to speak from her intuition. (Location 575)
Undeterred by exclusion from the IPA, the SFP began to find its own voice. In 1953, Lacan gave a seminal paper in Rome, “La function et le champ de la parole en psychanalyse”, which Françoise Dolto responded to by saying: With or without words, there is language … an infant, a few days old … expresses his contentment with responsive and meaningful noises … And if the mother mimics the same sound, echoing him, the infant receives and considers it. This exchange, this language … is a creative language which enables the infant to structure its sensations … which enables him to develop not into a mere digestive system but into a human being. [1989, p. 919] Thus, she began to declare her profound belief in the vital nature of language, a belief which had already led her into talking to babies, and so dramatically relieving their anguish. For the next seventeen years she and Jacques Lacan had a fruitful, if uneasy, professional relationship. She remained within the organization that Lacan founded in order not to be alone, because she believed that to be an analyst one has to communicate with others, as otherwise the lure of narcissism may be too powerful. (Location 590)
There followed a long and creative period of working as a clinician, teaching, broadcasting, writing, and involvement in social projects. In 1967, she gave a paper on a psychotic boy, Dominique, in a conference on infantile psychosis organized by Maud Mannoni in Paris. This conference was attended by Ronnie Laing and other members of the anti-psychiatry movement in Britain. Later, the paper was published as Le cas de Dominique, and has been one of only two books written by her hitherto published in English. Dolto was able to understand, by listening to Dominique’s words, the meaning of his illness and its place within his family history. She describes how his psychosis is a function of not having experienced the humanizing effects of benign castration, which had resulted in a malignant regression to an archaic body image. (Location 612)
From the moment of the baby’s arrival, as a team we care for the baby, not only as a body, which has to be helped to maintain a continuity of being, but we also have to care for the baby’s humanity, for him as a bearer of a history that precedes his coming into hospital. This history, of which his stay at the neonatal care unit will be only an episode, will continue into the future as long as there is no trauma to interrupt it. So often the tear of a premature birth testifies to a breaking of the chain of signifiers that prevents symbolization, making it impossible to carry the child. The neo-natal team has to bear in mind the context of gestation that is greater than the link between the mother and baby alone. (Location 694)
Every single body inscribed with different speech is as a consequence completely different. Medical knowledge (savoir) that speaks of the body in generalities thus clashes with the truth of every human being’s unique body. It is the link of truth between speech and the body that the analyst within a medical service comes to question. This variety of truth is different from medical knowledge, in that it raises the question of desire and of fantasy. (Location 705)
Then something amazing happened: one day we were standing around the incubator when Zora began to cry. Suddenly the mother said, “Ah, but I know what she wants. She’s hungry.” She was a baby that would never take a bottle. We quickly found one and gave it to the mother. This was the first time that Zora drank a whole bottle. The mother told me, “She now looks like a baby to me. That’s why I thought that she was hungry. Before, I preferred to think of her as if she had not yet been born, as if the nightmare of childbirth hadn’t happened. Now I (Location 737)
know that she is here, that she calls me.” (Location 741)
From this moment on she was able to be a mother. It was a month and a half after the baby’s birth. One day, a nurse said to Zora’s mother, “You know, she really is beautiful, your little girl. One day she’ll have beautiful children, just like you.” To hear this promise was very important for the woman, because what she heard in it was the possibility of repairing the wound her own mother had dealt her. She then slowly became more able to welcome her daughter, who in turn could begin to inscribe herself, without shame, in the family’s history. (Location 741)
It was very important that the staff accepted this mother the way she was, rejecting her daughter and being aggressive towards them, without trying to enforce at any cost a mother-child attachment, in order to make a link before the mother was able to speak about what in her own history was making it impossible for her to be a mother. Only then could she hear the cry of her daughter as a call, and so to enable her baby to be a subject. (Location 749)
Only a long time afterwards, when we had understood Steve’s history, in listening to his parents as they were telling it to us, did we say to ourselves, “In order to survive, this little boy needs to put this distance between us and himself.” He knew that love is not so simple. The parents told us that within two generations there had been two crimes of passion. And here was this little boy—do not ask me how or why—who knew that love is not just to do with pleasure but that love can kill. Some babies and children have an uncanny sense of the dangers involved in loving. (Location 767)
At birth, the baby only exists in and through his mother—his mother, or any other person who touches him, who speaks to him, who names him, who tells him whom he is: whoever defines him as a boy or a girl, who intimates what he is feeling or what he is thinking, whoever it is who is able to understand him. In the beginning, a little human being is not a subject, in spite of what is sometimes said. The subject is in the other. The little one is not a subject. The subject of the unconscious is constituted first in the other: the one who speaks and who speaks to him, who speaks to him as a function of his own desire. The baby exists and he is a human being, but he is not yet a subject. We might say that he is an object, or, according to Lacan, “an object of jouissance” (1977a). If all goes well, the child is an object of jouissance, valued, rendered “phallic” by his mother: in the mother’s eyes the infant is transformed from an object of desire into a subject of desire. This first joyful encounter, the mother’s response to the call of her baby, is essential. (Location 773)
The initial stage is essential, when the infant is “phallicized”, made into a subject of desire by the mother. However, when a mother beholds a baby who is too small, she feels ashamed and guilt-stricken and suffers a breakdown in her imaginative capacity. The separation that is indispensable to the formation of the baby as a subject becomes problematic because the symbolic will fail him. Without lack, without separation, no demand is possible. During the process of resuscitation the baby does not experience the need to make a demand. The small, premature newborn is connected to a machine, a machine that is always there. There is no rhythm in the lives of these babies, there is no discontinuity, there is no night and no day. The child is never hungry. By what means is this baby going to satisfy himself? (Location 784)
But let us get back to the more specific problem of feeding. Zora’s cry was identified by her mother as a call, a demand to be fed, and seems to have triggered within Zora a desire to drink. (Location 797)
Even when you stuff the mouth, the mouth that opens in response to the drive is not satisfied by the food, the food is in the service of the (Location 800)
pleasure of the mouth. The oral drive does no more than order from the menu. For the oral drive it is not a question of food but of the breast, the object that stimulates desire. [1977b, p. 167] The issue of feeding in the resuscitation unit strikes at the heart of this problem. To orientate ourselves at this point in this we must first get out of a psychologizing tendency that confuses the drive and the instinct. For Freud, the drive (pulsion) is a key concept, because it gives human beings their life force. It is the drives that give us the force to live and which give neurotic symptoms the energy to constitute themselves. (Location 801)
We are thus confronted with the question of desire. What desire induces a 500-gram baby to either live or die? What, beyond the body itself, are we trying to resuscitate? We are now very far from it being merely a question of nourishment. Rather, it indicates that we should allow for the loop that leads the child to make a demand to be fed, to be established. It is not a question of encouraging the child to desire. It is more a question of making the child desire to desire, because that is what keeps us all alive, that we desire to desire. And we never stop, that is why we are here every morning, why we love, why we hate, why we make bonds with others. (Location 814)
The drive misses its object, creating a loop, which then leads it back, rekindling its source, and once more setting off on its trajectory. In this way, one always desires and one always is—to use Dolto’s expression—in one’s ‘going-becoming’ allant-devenant, in the spirit of one’s gender. One moves forward. (Location 822)
This story of a loop of desire which provokes desire and yet more desire and which ensures that we are alive rather than dead, is, however, not something mechanical: it requires the involvement of another human being. (Location 824)
All the work done in the resuscitation unit is undertaken with the aim of giving relationship to a human being priority over relationship to a machine, in order to avoid the serious psychological repercussions, which are always a risk, even if the baby survives resuscitation physically. (Location 838)
For the newborn, the other is, in the beginning, not separate and, most importantly, does not make sense to him. It is only at the time of separation that the child will become a subject. The separation from things, from the surrounding world occurs when one begins to say to oneself, “Oh, look, I am different.” His separation from the machine will have to be worked with, and it will be necessary to put intermediaries between the machine and the infant, the doctors, the staff, the parents, to replace the noise with words. The separation will only occur following this first alienation, but the subject who is separating himself will suffer yet another alienation because he will try to deny the separation at any cost. We spend our lives trying to deny separation—to use an object to plug the hole of this loss: the object of the oral drive, for example, or of the anal drive, and of all the other drives. This object, which is now cut off from him, because he does not have it any more, is now the cause of his desire, so that he has a desire to find it again, to find something. And it is here that the fantasy is formed and that is what feeds the mouth. (Location 841)
It had occurred to us that the service itself was, in fact, made to position itself as this third function, as the paternal function, thereby allowing separation. It seems to us important to emphasize not the preservation of a mother-child link at any cost, but that time should be taken so that work can be done to effect a real separation; that there should be recognition of lack, of loss, so that a desire for desire may be established. (Location 855)
Medical staff are now beginning to recognize that the most sophisticated protocols will not suffice to resuscitate an infant. Even if the effects of language on the bodies and the being of infants appear to them to be mysterious or even like witchcraft, the medical staff know that paediatrics must take psychoanalysis into account in order to receive and welcome the child, a welcome that the infant needs in order for the desire for life to establish itself. In addition to acknowledging the scientific progress made by modern medicine, doctors may now acknowledge their debt to the thinking and practice of Françoise Dolto. (Location 862)
Donald Winnicott and Françoise Dolto were contemporaries; both were paediatricians and psychoanalysts, both were extremely sensitive to the developing mind of the infant, and both shared the same interests in primitive emotional disorders. Thus, it is surprising that Winnicott is known to have dismissed her as being too intuitive. English psychoanalysis has persisted in being deeply suspicious of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and this accounts in part for the lack of interest in Françoise Dolto’s work, which, within France, has had revolutionary effects on childcare. (Location 879)
For Lacan, there is no such thing as a preverbal period or a pre-linguistic world because, before an infant speaks, it is spoken to and spoken about. When an infant is born, he is born into language, a language that has been prepared for him by both his culture and his inheritance. The infant is born into and through language, the language of the other, and the psychic survival of the infant is dependent on language. From the earliest days, the infant demands a response; without a response there is no language acquisition and no infant. There is no identity outside of language not created or conferred through language, and the truth and falsehood of identity lies in language, not in the person. The infant absorbs and is absorbed by a language that, in Lacanian terms, constitutes the subject, the subject of desires, demands, expectations, images, identity, and of the various responses it evokes. Long before it can actually speak, its speech is filled with the speech of others. (Location 893)
The function of analysis is, therefore, to free the patient from a predetermined language, from the alienating words of others, which is inevitably a painful procedure. Before a child is born, its family will hold preconceptions about the child, many of these unconscious, which leads to misrecognition of identity. (Location 906)
My patient displayed a prematurity in many aspects of her development and found the process of transition from one stage of life to the next unbearably painful. She did not feel entitled to her own life, as if she was living in the shadow of another’s. It transpired that her mother, the eldest child, had suffered terribly when her baby brother, the second child, had died when she was two. She had suffered the most terrible grief, jealousy, guilt, and lack of entitlement to her own life, which had been transmitted to my patient. My patient unconsciously bore the consequences of the baby’s death alongside her mother. As a child, she had felt charged with bringing the dead part of her mother and father to life. In the course of the analysis, it was possible for my patient to separate from the mistaken identity conferred on her inadvertently, by both her parents, so that she became free to pursue her own creative life, rather than feeling that she had to compulsively bring others to life. (Location 914)
Françoise Dolto describes the process of recognition of the sepa-rateness of the child by the parents as entailing an acceptance by the parents of their own castration in the face of the birth of their child. At different stages in the child’s life, the child also has to accept various benign castrations. The child can only do this if the parents accept the (Location 921)
castration of his birth, after which they must respect their child as a separate and equal human being, who has his own intelligence about living and his own desire. The history and the nature of the parents’ subjectivity might, however, fix the child as an “… (Location 924)
She did not infantilize children, or even babies. She spoke to them with respect, even the tiniest infants, explaining to them the nature of their plight. Her most astonishing discovery was of the precociousness of the child’s sensitivity to speech. She would converse with foetuses and newborn babies, convinced that… (Location 928)
She believed that the suffering of children is nearly always linked to that which is unsaid, to implicit lies, even if these have been… (Location 934)
She had remarkable success in calming troubled infants by speaking to them. The school of psychoanalysis to which she belonged believed that the child is, from the beginning, capable of being in a human relationship. The child is not in a chrysalis, which, with the aid of good enough mothering, will become a full human subject. As a consequence, psychopathology is not seen by these French analysts as a breakdown in the process of evolution into adulthood, but rather as the subject’s deceit or deception of his own humanity, as the annihilation of his own desire in favour of the Other’s will. The analyst, therefore, is not a substitute parent, but is a speaker of truth. The I of the baby is immature but… (Location 935)
The image inconsciente du corps is an unconscious representation of the primitive experience and emotional history of the infant, which is structured by language. It is not just a specular image, like the mirror image. Dolto’s conception of the mirror stage is different from that of Lacan (1977). For Dolto, the mirror stage is traumatic, wounding the infant’s sense of self. The mirror stage establishes a separation between the baby and the mother, with the consequence that the scopic image substitutes for the image inconsciente du corps that becomes unconscious. After the mirror stage, the image inconsciente du corps is repressed in favour of the mirror image The mirror stage entails a castration of sensory experience, of the world of touch, smell and taste, privileging the visual image, which might deceive. After the mirror stage, the unconscious image of the body only manifests itself in dreams; otherwise it underpins and integrates the psyche-soma and guarantees authentic being. Françoise Dolto believed that the unconscious image of the body breaks through traumatically in psychosis. (Location 948)
Dolto believed that, in the transference, one can successfully lift the prohibition which blocks a memory if it brings to life an archaic unconscious body image hitherto petrified. It is this primitive unconscious body image which is involved in that which has been foreclosed. In the unconscious, an element of experience has been registered but not symbolized; it has no resonance within the history of the subject because it has no links to language. An experience of rupture may be represented in the unconscious, but it is not symbolized as a castration. She believed that what has been foreclosed can be overcome in analysis, within a regressed transference (Location 1009)
Dolto talks about autism as entailing a very early rupture in the mother-infant relationship, before or after birth, a rupture that has never been spoken about and which has left the infant with no alternative but to relate to a part of his own body, in a masturbatory relationship. Autism entails a rupture in the narcissism of the subject; the Other is reduced to a part of the unconscious image of the body, which is traumatized at the foetal or (Location 1023)
early oral stage. The only law is a cosmic law, associated with intra-uterine life: the infant resides in a state of fusional desire, unseparated from a ghost mother and is menaced by death, which is warded off by mimicry (Dolto, 1984, p. 225). (Location 1026)
They haven’t thought about you enough but the fact that you have survived demonstrates that you have enough of the strength given to you by your mother and father to go on living. And now it is up to you to represent the family. [ibid., p. 60] She manifests a respect and toughness in the face of tragedy, based on a genuine faith in the capacity of children to find emotional and spiritual resources within themselves. She states that all our losses revive our early experiences of separation and loss, beginning with the cutting of the umbilical cord and the loss of the placenta and the womb, and that we have to express our aggression to restore our damaged narcissism and to save us from falling into depression. She emphasizes that it is vital, when working with abandoned children, to have faith in their capacity to sustain their sense of loss; if they are supported and told the truth, their loss can then be symbolized. (Location 1074)
Desire arises out of the acceptance of castration, in both the parents and the child. If, for any reason, the parents are unable to accept the necessity of their castration, it may become an invitation to the child to turn back and to become psychotic. The relation of castration to desire can be understood as the cutting of unlimited boundless desire; in the acceptance of boundaries, desire becomes contained, focused, and capable of realization. In L’Image inconsciente du corps (1984), she describes castration as: A prohibition of desire in relation to certain means of gaining pleasure; the castration has a harmonising and progressive effect in so far as the desiring subject is enabled to integrate the law which humanises him. [p. 301] The various castrations, umbilical, oral, anal, and phallic bring changes because they have symbolic effects, and they then generate new ways of being. If they have pathological effects, it is because they are not delivered with respect, confidence, and in truth. From the beginning, the child should be recognized as separate and different and not as an image of the parents’ desires and demands. Dolto’s view is that a psychotic child is only loved if he exists within the death drives, deprived of a right to live autonomously. (Location 1086)
If the analyst can give up his position of being the subject of the desire for life, the child may be able to find in the drowsy analyst a subject who can become for him a support, an extension of himself. The child finds calm, order, and security, and is able to play peacefully, overcoming his previous state of agitation, because, at a deep unconscious level, he feels recognized. The analyst accepts that, by yielding to drowsiness, he becomes an object, so that the child may become a subject. Drowsiness in a session is part of countertransference and, as such, also belongs to the patient. It needs to be spoken about to give it meaning. (Location 1184)
Sometimes, the experience of lethargy denotes aggression; sometimes, it does not. Sometimes, it represents a refusal of being; sometimes, it is a desire for peace. The death drive expresses itself as the serenity that is found in deep sleep. When desire is exhausted, it may be found again within the death drive. When the subject is eclipsed in sleep, having let go, the play of desire takes over. There is no aggression in the death drive, whereas, by contrast, the aggressive drive is part of the life force of an individual who wants to kill, which is frequently turned inwards on the other within the self, on the enemy within the body. (Location 1189)
Dolto counsels caution in relation to the desire for sleep, and suggests that each therapist should be aware of its meaning for themselves and their patients. She suggests that drowsiness may signal the absence of a language. It is necessary to clarify the nature of the transference and the countertransference; to ask how old the child is in his regression, and what he is trying to find once more, in the here and now, in his relationship with the analyst. What position is he putting me in, in whose place? We have to be open to the psychotic elements within ourselves in order to be able to make contact with the psychosis in our patients. When we speak of psychosis, we also mean that a necessary code is unknown, is unavailable. The lethargy of the analyst may derive from being inarticulate in the face of what the psychotic cannot express, unless the analyst lets go into sleep. Dolto describes how she has experienced being with children who can only express themselves through play if the analyst is drowsily absent. It may be the case that the analyst has to become the infant in a fusional relationship with the child, who can now refind security in his identification with the mother he has introjected. After a session of this kind, she reports that a psychotic child becomes more peaceful. (Location 1194)
Dolto explained to the children that she was not there to love them, but to work with them, and that she could only work if she was paid. Each child was encouraged to bring a pebble as symbolic payment. Dolto sometimes asked the analysts to play On one occasion, she asked the men to sing because that particular child needed to hear the voice of men. Singing brought them all to life. The analysts were brought into direct contact with the vibrations of the child’s unconscious, giving the child a security it had never previously experienced. (Location 1208)
Dolto had an almost uncanny ability to speak to the child from the child’s point of view, in a language, however mad it might appear to an adult, that was easily comprehensible to the child. She had considerable respect for the intelligence of babies, and realized how deeply troubled babies are by what they perceive. In addition, she had a tremendous desire to enter the child’s anguish-ridden experience, so that it could be shared within a community. (Location 1218)
We are for them a partial object but we do not know which object. So we may feel quite lost without a reference point. We have to tell them of our confusion, verbalise it … If we put our state of mind into words they can make a start. If we do not tell them how we feel we do not represent a person to them. We are identified as a part object and because of this we are ill at ease. [1982, p. 82] (Location 1224)
A child with the potential for psychosis takes refuge in an imaginary world and regresses into a parasitic, foetal state. The lack of a language to make sense of his experience will lead such a child to inhabit a world of pure sensation, becoming a child of the cosmos, not of human intercourse. In his isolation, he regresses towards an archaic body image that precludes the potential for the development of symbolization. Regression is a defensive resort in the face of the terror of loss of continuity of being. Françoise Dolto is profoundly compassionate, perceiving the psychotic child as being an isolate, without solace. With great faith in humanity, Françoise Dolto healed by virtue of her capacity to communicate with consummate skill and with respect for the psychotic child as a subject of his own desire, listening carefully to the truth of his history spoken through words and symptoms. (Location 1250)
Françoise Dolto considered herself to be focused on the psychopathology of everyday life, while she viewed Melanie Klein’s interests as being more in understanding psychosis. Françoise Dolto was impressed by Melanie Klein’s personality and charisma, but considered that she was not doing psychoanalysis, but psychotherapy. It is a major distinction, so badly understood by so many people, between psychoanalysis, that is a concern for the kind of person one becomes as a result of the experience of a childhood history, and psychotherapy, that can take all sorts of means to directly help his actual difficulties. [Dolto, 1997b, p. 244] For the psychoanalyst, “… our role is not to desire something for someone, but to be the one who can cause the other’s desire to happen” (Dolto, 1982, p. 84). (Location 1339)
At times, Françoise Dolto would consider other forms of communications, including, but not limited to, those from an inter-generational collective unconscious and psychosomatic conditions. Françoise Dolto could go past frontiers that other scientists would hesitate to cross. “Neuro-biologists smile and shrug their shoulders. They say, ‘I don’t believe in telepathy.’ But the telepathy between the baby and mother is well known to all mums” (Dolto, 1997a, p. 244). For Françoise Dolto, each child chooses to be born and to live in order to express its desires for and in life. This notion of desires and how to differentiate them from needs was vital for Françoise Dolto. It is the capacity of the child to be alive and to express itself through language that leads the child to the acknowledgement of its desires, otherwise there would only be objects and needs. Psychoanalysts know that life is only about our desires. (Location 1381)
The indication for a clinical intervention is when a child feels caught in a painful interrelational conflict that spoils his (Location 1400)
existence, when otherwise there would be everything for it to be happy (Location 1401)
Françoise Dolto did evolve the idea of a symbolic payment that she expected from children. This may be in the form of a stone, a square of coloured paper, or even ten centimes. This represented a contract between the two of them, a debt felt by the child, as well as a sense of autonomy and separation of the desires of the child from the desires of the parents. The symbolic payment is a reminder that work is being done, in which the child adjusts its way of being. It is neither a partial object nor a gift, and does not need to be interpreted. A child who wishes to express a negative transference will feel increasingly anxious about bringing the symbolic payment. In the preliminary meetings, Françoise Dolto would see or, at the very least, have contact with both parents together, if the child had not reached puberty and was at least five years old. She would see the parents with the child and she would also see each parent alone, to establish their Oedipal history. An initial three sessions would be agreed to see if psychoanalysis would be of potential benefit. If that were the case, a more formal and longer term contract with the symbolic payment would be set out. If the child was upset by this, then the psychoanalyst would have to work out whether the child wished to stay in the situation in which it found itself, in which case treatment should not be offered, or whether it marked a rejection of the parents, in which case, it might be offered. The psychoanalyst should respect the child’s desires and decisions (Ledoux, 1990, p. 169). (Location 1403)
Even though nowadays men rarely wear hats, or smoke pipes, children often still draw these as a representation of their fathers, even if father is a non-smoker. There will be something that emphasizes the head that connects with the phallic person in their life, the one with the authoritative words. Women are often depicted as carrying bags, or cases, which may symbolize their femininity. Boys will draw belts with a large circle on them, or a button to represent their awareness of a lack of valued genitals (Winter & Dolto, 2002, p. 59). (Location 1429)
Instead of making interpretations that bring phantasies into consciousness, Françoise Dolto is more directive in asking how the child links himself with the drawing. (Location 1435)
Sophie Morgenstern’s technique evolved so that she would say nothing, or very little, during sessions, for up to a year when with children, while they worked on their drawings. After forty minutes into a session, she would announce that it was at an end, and the child would often say, “Already?” This was not an expression of disappointment, but a reflection of how much work the child had already done. Some of the children got better even without much having been said. (Location 1448)
It was Françoise Dolto’s view that a single painting was enough to create a relationship and establish the transference. She understood a drawing as something that needed to be heard through the observations of another. (Location 1452)
It is important to closely observe not only the contents of the drawings, but the sequence in which they are drawn, the colours used, and which elements, if any, are later discarded. It is also important to pay attention to the conduct and emotions of a child while it is drawing. (Location 1457)
Making a drawing should always be considered as work and not play for both the child and the psychoanalyst. (Location 1459)
Understanding the meaning of illusion, mirrors, phantasy, and images of the body through the intermediary of words is central to the work of Françoise Dolto. The visual is a good starting place to get to the verbal. When a child is not able to articulate something verbally, another creative language is used, such as drawings and modelling with some form of plastic material. (Location 1464)
Françoise Dolto was well known for her clinical observations, and it seems appropriate to give some brief examples of the way in which she worked. Working with children is facilitated, by having a particular framework. There should be a table with paper and crayons as well as some material that a child can use to model. The psychoanalyst should remain outside the visual field of view of the child, but by his side. Interpretations in psychoanalysis, whether linked to free associations of adults or the drawings of children, are not expert declarations, but are words that allow the adult or child to become aware of new and different associations. The analyst says to the child who has accepted a contract to come and get better from that which he feels within himself as an obstacle in his path of development. You can say in words, drawings, or by making models, all that you think about, or feel while you are here, even if it is about other people that you know, and even if you think (or have been told), that you must not say it. [Dolto, 1981, p. 69] (Location 1469)
He feels that it would be inappropriate to comment while Christian is drawing, as it would be an interruption, like making a comment to someone who was dreaming about the meaning of their dream. The analyst acknowledges that it may be some resistance on his part, but he feels strongly that he does not want to rush in. (Location 1521)
In the first sessions, claims Françoise Dolto, it is better not to simply ask a child, as it were, out of the blue, “What do you have to say”, but to treat him as an individual and to introduce yourself and explain why you have agreed to see him. It is also important, as in any analysis, to remind the child that it is not only the analyst, but the child who has to do the work. It is also important to make clear that what is said in the analysis will not be repeated outside and to tell the parents that they should not ask of their child to tell them what took place. If parents do not follow this guidance, then the child is right not to tell them. (Location 1549)
Dolto’s originality lies in the fact that, from the very outset, she placed the problem of the body at the core of her analytical practice, whether in the treatment of adults or children. What Dolto calls the unconscious image of the body—we will come back to this point later—is the living synthesis of the emotional, sensory, and language experiences of early infancy. For Dolto, such experiences make up the treasure trove of the unconscious that succumbs to repression after the mirror stage and the Oedipal complex. (Location 1657)
The drawings and clay figures made by children play an important role in Dolto’s practice because she considered them as so many “self-portraits”. However, this does not mean that they were portraits in the traditional visual sense. In order to interpret the drawings and locate the projection of various instances of the Freudian psychic apparatus (the id, the ego, and the superego), Dolto relied solely on the verbal associations that the child makes when commenting on its drawings. (Location 1672)
The “image” of the body is, on the other hand, specific to each one of us and linked to the subject and the subject’s history. It is the living synthesis of the emotional experiences of the desiring subject, the unconscious memory of lived relational experiences, both narcissistic and interrelational. The unconscious image of the body is always shaped in relation to the other—in particular to the care-giving mother—and refers the subject of desire to her jouir. In this respect, Dolto remains very faithful to Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). However, the jouir is always mediated by the language of communication with others, e.g., the words of the mother that articulate the baby’s struggles and validates (valorizes) them or overrules them—”You are happy.” “You like that, don’t you?” “You’re not comfortable.” “Don’t touch. It’s dirty”, etc. (Location 1687)
the body image is symbolized through subject-to-subject exchanges despite the physical infirmity. (Location 1707)
The unconscious image of the body is thus structured around intersubjective relationships. If there is no speech, no possibility of communication, the subject’s symbolization remains “on hold”. For Françoise Dolto, language—true language that conveys meaning for the subject—is always closely connected with the body. Understanding a word depends both on the body schema and on the unconscious image of the body linked to the real exchanges that accompanied the assimilation of the word. “To have meaning, words must first of all be embodied”, as Dolto once wrote. (Location 1708)
When Freud describes religion as an illusion, he does not mean that it is necessarily false, just that it cannot be proved by scientific methods. He did consider religion to be a universal neurosis, and that it was often obsessional in nature, an expression of the search for an exalted father figure. He considered the mystic’s oceanic feeling to be an expression of the omnipotent and narcissistic feelings that a child has in the womb, or in very early childhood, but he also recognized that (Location 3452)
religious traditions could have therapeutic qualities. (Location 3456)
about psychoanalysis, particularly if he had not been the first to think of them. The result, in the institutions that he and his immediate followers set up, was that legitimate variations from accepted Freudian ideas have been considered as tantamount to heresy, often leading to the equivalent of excommunication. (Location 3467)
The classical psychoanalytic approach to religion has its origins in Freud’s complicated relationship to his father, the anti-Semitism to be found in Austria, and his feelings towards, as he saw it, Jung’s defection, to a greater degree then is usually recognized. The problem remains that psychoanalysis does not adequately explain, or understand, either religion or religious experience. It may be that the psychoanalytic model needs to be refined to allow for other states of consciousness, or the possibility that consciousness is there from the beginning and is beyond physicality. (Location 3479)
Lacan’s philosophy is to follow Spinoza, and that joy, or jouissance, is the greatest virtue. When a patient can find pleasure in living, there is no call for the analysis to continue. (Location 3512)
Françoise Dolto audaciously claimed that not only does psychoanalysis not obstruct access to spirituality, but, on the contrary, being in analysis is a path that people should be encouraged to take to find their religious identity. Françoise Dolto was a classically trained psychoanalyst, but with a radically different approach to religion. Her training analysis with René Laforgue was an experience that enabled her to discover her adult religious faith. Although one can respect Françoise Dolto’s experience, there should be some caution in extrapolating from such a single experience to a general application, as it can lead to the kind of rigidity found earlier in the Buddhist story. Laforgue was very critical of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. Unlike Freud, he considered religion to be a normal part of the psyche, like dreaming. In the same way that one needed to sleep in order to remain physically healthy, so one needed religion to maintain a healthy mental balance (Laforgue, 1995). Françoise Dolto pointed out that, whenever one comes to the end of psychoanalytic thinking, something else appears, which is not psychoanalytic. Such a notion appears to have annoyed and confused many of her colleagues, possibly because it is a reminder that psychoanalysis has its limits, but possibly also because she went on to express herself in what appears to be a quasi-mystical manner. (Location 3520)
Françoise Dolto’s view of religious education is that it should be more than to patronize children, because they are small, by exposing (Location 3592)
them to gaudy images of sentimental saints, pious miracles, dubious morality, or the singing of dreary hymns. Rather, children should be shown and educated about the great works of art and music, and sacred texts with all their difficult words. Education in a religious context should not be limited to obedience, knowing what is forbidden, rituals, inducing guilt and crushing the independence of developing minds. Religions are often at their best when in a prophetic mode; they defy authority and are subversive and challenging to authority. A child’s metaphysical questions, the sense of what is holy, spiritual, and sacred, should be taken seriously. Otherwise how else will a child learn about the symbolic value of even the simplest of religious acts (Chérer, 2008, pp. 180–181)? (Location 3593)
When Françoise Dolto speaks about desire, she is essentially referring to an inter-human communication. It is not a reference to a need. A need can be satisfied by an object. A desire cannot. At the start of life, there are three unconscious desires, that of the father, the mother, and the newborn child. This is not about envy, or pleasure. It is a process of exchange leading to an encounter. The baby represents the incarnation of the desire for life through an encounter between the parents. However, desire is not about physiology, but language, and is not satisfied through any bodily climax. Needs can be met, but not desires. Yet, desire can become a source of energy, leading to inventive, creative, and imaginative expressions. However, too much pleasure and (Location 3684)
satisfaction leads to a mutilation of creativity and the atrophy of communication. (Location 3690)
It is the ability to keep the question open that allows the subject to exist and to be. Françoise Dolto maintains that answering a question might be a premature foreclosure that can put any question at risk and prevent it from keeping alive the desire that the subject can bring into creation. The answer can block the creativity of the question. (Location 3735)
Françoise Dolto said that there is only one kind of sin and that is to go against one’s desires. If religion is an illusion, it is not one like any other. She castigates Freud’s The Future of an Illusion as one of the worst of his books, a view that Freud might well have shared. It is not enough to reduce religion to an obsessional neurosis. She says that the book is written by someone who feels they have not been respected and who projects this on to religion. With hindsight, one might also say this lack of respect was an issue for Françoise Dolto. Freud could not accept his father as his equal and Françoise Dolto’s mother had difficulty in accepting the abilities of her daughter. (Location 3773)