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During her lifetime Francoise Dolto revolutionized the psychoanalytic understanding of childhood. As an early pioneer, she emphasized that the child is to be recognized from birth as a person. As a gifted and innovative clinician, Dolto developed her ideas about the unconscious image of the body. An image that is unique to each individual and linked to both a person's history and narcissism, rather then their physicality. It is the symbolic incarnation of a person's desires. Dolto began her career as a member of the IPA, was admired by Winnicott, close to Lacan and influenced by Morgenstern. Her life witnessed an extraordinary evolution from the conservatism of her parents, through the second World War, to the turbulence of Paris in the 1950s and 60s. In the succeeding years, Dolto made a number of original contributions to the understanding of psychosis, neonatology, female sexuality, education, and religion. Although controversial, she was able to write both for the general public and for professional colleagues.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908-88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto's rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto's continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.
This book is the author's 1939 medical thesis and is dedicated to medical practitioners, paediatricians, and parents without prior knowledge of psychoanalysis. The author's aim was to sensitise people to the unconscious dimensions of many problems in children. She demonstrates here, through sixteen case studies, how often children's difficulties at school and at home - be they behavioural or due to impaired learning abilities - are the expression of psychological issues linked with their developing sexuality and castration anxiety, and result in physical symptoms such as enuresis and encopresis. The author points out that the awareness of the self and self-responsibility often develops for young people in families in which the parents do not know how to listen or even more importantly cannot be listened to with trust. There is also a summary of Freud's theories of the different stages of the evolution of the drives, as well as the central developmental role played by the castration complex, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus Complex.
FRANÇOISE DOLTO AND LANGUAGE is about one of the greatest psychoanalysts the world has known; she was one of the pioneers of child psychoanalysis. Pierre F. Walter interviewed Françoise Dolto in 1986, after having visited "La Maison Verte" in Paris, a communication center she had created for parents and children, that mainly served to prepare children for greater lapses of time away from their parents and the early Kindergarten experience. The interview took place in Dolto's apartment at 260, rue Saint-Jacques, near the Panthéon, Paris. The author reports that he discussed with Dr. Dolto his permissive educational approach and that the dialogue then expanded on Summerhill, R. D. Laing's w...
This psychobiographical study of the renowned French pediatrician and psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto introduces both her theories of child development and her unique insights into language and identity. A friend of Jacques Lacan’s, Dolto believed that we are all humanized through language, and that the words we use carry unconscious traces of our early histories of love, suffering and desire. Suggesting that infants unconsciously symbolize and that a continuous circulation of unconscious affects—the transference—prevails in all language-based relations, her findings challenge assumptions about autism, autobiography, linguistics, literacy, pedagogy and therapy. Dolto’s own corpus—a rich archive blending the personal and professional—demonstrates this, with echoes between Dolto’s constructs about the child and her own challenging childhood. This fascinating book will not only introduce the work of Françoise Dolto to many readers, but will be a valuable resource for all psychoanalytic researchers and theorists interested in childhood, language and identity.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908–88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto’s rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto’s continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.
The Unconscious Body Image espouses a completely original view of the links between physical and psychic development, providing fresh insight into our understanding of psychosomatic symptoms and child development. Françoise Dolto describes how unconsciously held mental images of the body and its functioning impact upon the subject’s feelings and ideas of themself, and conversely how emotions and ideas impact upon the body’s functioning by way of these unconscious images. The Unconscious Body Image also presents Dolto’s view of the development of mind in relation to unconscious body images generated at each stage of development (oral, anal, genital, latency and puberty), and ideas about psychic castration at each developmental stage and children’s socialisation, filling a significant gap in psychoanalytic understanding of the mental integration of social law. This book will be a key text for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, particularly those working with children, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and psychodynamic practitioners in the social sciences, childcare and education.
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