Françoise Dolto and Child Psychoanalysis

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FRANÇOISE DOLTO AND

CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS


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BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY LITIGATION

COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD

THE LEADERSHIP I CHING

LEADERSHIP & CAREER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CREATIVE-C LEARNING

INTEGRATE YOUR EMOTIONS

KRISHNAMURTI AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

THE NEW PARADIGM IN BUSINESS , LEADERSHIP AND CAREER

THE NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUALITY

THE NEW PARADIGM IN SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS THEORY

THE VIBRANT NATURE OF LIFE

SHAMANIC WISDOM MEETS THE WESTERN MIND

CREATIVE GENIUS

THE BETTER LIFE

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER

FRITJOF CAPRA AND THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE

FRANÇOISE DOLTO AND CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS


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FRANÇOISE

DOLTOAND CHILD

PSYCHO-ANALYSISSHORT BIOGRAPHY , BOOK REVIEWS ,

QUOTES , AND COMMENTS(GREAT MINDS SERIES , VOL , 4)

by Peter Fritz Walter


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About the Author

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerlandand the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused uponfine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciencesand humanities.

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a highschool award for creative writing and editorial work for theschool magazine.

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in

European Integration at

Saarland

University, Germany, and witha Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in1987.

He then took courses in psychology at the University of Gene-va and interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lausanneand Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through ahypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist inLausanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his innerchild.

In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psycho-analyst Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) in Paris and interviewed her.A long correspondence followed up to their encounter which wasconsidered by the curators of the Dolto Trust interesting enoughto be published in a book alongside all of Dolto’s other letter ex-changes by Gallimard Publishers in Paris, in 2005.

After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach,Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher and consultant.

His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-culturaland interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works andshort stories focus upon education, philosophy, perennial wis-dom, and the poetic formulation of an integrative worldview.

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writesEnglish as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. Healso reads source literature for his research works in Spanish,Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions ofThai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.

All of Pierre’s books are hand-crafted and self-published, de-signed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company,Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICAand SCM (Sirius-C Media).


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The author’s profits from this book are being donated to charity.


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Contents

Introduction 9About Great Minds Series

Chapter One

13Short Biography

Books Reviewed 25

Chapter Two

27La Cause des Enfants

Review

28

Quotes

42

Parents and Princes 42

Fear and Death 42

Permissive Cultures vs. Our Culture 43

The Importance of Language 43

About Sex Education 43

The Lost Knowledge about Child Sexuality 44

The Sinful Child 45

The Prison of Modern Childhood 45

Our Obsession with Safety and Overprotection 45

Genius and the Inner Child 47

The Value of Losing Illusions 47

The Value of Subjectiveness

48Questioning Cultural and Scientific Conditioning 48

About Computers and Videogames 49

Thoughts on Masturbation 50


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The Nature of Desire 54

Children, a Special Race? 54

The Inner Child

55Children Are Unafraid 56

Mother-Child Telepathy 57

Pathologies Resulting from Precocious Nursery Placement 57

Welcoming the Newborn 58

Marginalized Uniqueness and Originality 58

Guilt vs. Responsibility 60

Theories of the Child’s Superior Capabilities 60

Importance of Language 2

61

Chapter Three 65Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie

Review

66

Quotes

76

Chapter Four

81Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 1

Chapter Five 87Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 2

Chapter Six

101Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 3

Bibliography

107Contextual Bibliography

Personal Notes

125


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IntroductionAbout Great Minds Series

We are currently transiting as a human race a time of

great challenge and adventure that opens to us new path-

ways for rediscovering and integrating the perennial holis-

tic wisdom of ancient civilizations into our modern scienceparadigm. These civilizations were thriving before patriar-

chy was putting nature upside-down.

Currently, with the advent of the networked global so-

ciety, and systems theory as its scientific paradigm, we are

looking into a different world, with a rise of ‘horizontal’

and ‘sustainable’ structures both in our business culture,and in science, and last not least on the important areas of

psychology, medicine, and spirituality.

—A paradigm, from Greek ‘paradeigma,’ is a pattern of things, a

configuration of ideas, a set of dominant beliefs, a certain way of look-ing at the world, a set of assumptions, a frame of reference or lens, andeven an entire worldview.


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While most of this new and yet old path has yet to be

trotted, we cannot any longer overlook the changes that

happen all around us virtually every day.

Invariably, as students, scientists, doctors, consultants,

lawyers, business executives or government officials, we

face problems today that are so complex, entangled and

novel that they cannot possibly be solved on the basis of

our old paradigm, and our old way of thinking. As AlbertEinstein said, we cannot solve a problem on the same level

of thought that created it in the first place— hence the need

for changing our view of looking at things, the world, and

our personal and collective predicaments.

What still about half a decade ago seemed unlikely is

happening now all around us: we are rediscovering moreand more fragments of an integrative and holistic wisdom

that represents the cultural and scientific treasure of many

ancient tribes and kingdoms that were based upon a per-

ennial tradition which held that all in our universe is inter-

connected and interrelated, and that humans are set in the

world to live in unison with the infinite wisdom inherentin creation as a major task for driving evolution forward!

It happens in science, since the advent of relativity the-

ory, quantum physics and string theory, it happens in neu-

roscience and systems theory, it happens in molecular bi-

ology, and in ecology, and as a result, and because science

is a major motor in society, it happens now with increasingspeed in the industrial and the business world, and in the


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way people earn their lives and manifest their innate tal-

ents through their professional engagement.

And it happens also, and what this book is set to em-

phasize, in psychology and psychoanalysis, for Françoise

Dolto, while having been a member of the Freudian psy-

choanalytic school, has created an approach to healing

psychotic children that was really unknown to the founder

of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.More and more people begin to realize that we cannot

honestly continue to destroy our globe by disregarding the

natural law of self-regulation, both outwardly, by polluting

air and water, and inside, by tolerating our emotions to be

in a state of repression and turmoil.

Self-regulation is built into the life function and it can be found as a consistent pattern in the lifestyle of natives

peoples around the world. It is similar with our immense

intuitive and imaginal faculties that were downplayed in

centuries of darkness and fragmentation, and that now

emerge anew as major key stones in a worldview that puts

the whole human at the frontline, a human who uses theirwhole brain, and who knows to balance their emotions

and natural passions so as to arrive at a state of inner peace

and synergetic relationships with others that bring mutual

benefit instead of one-sided egotistic satisfaction.

For lasting changes to happen, however, to paraphrase

J. Krishnamurti, we need to change the thinker, we need to

undergo a transformation that puts our higher self up as

the caretaker of our lives, not our conditioned ego.

ABOUT GREAT MINDS SERIES

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Hence the need to really look over the fence and get

beyond social, cultural and racial conditioning for adopt-

ing an integrative and holistic worldview that is focused

on more than problem-solving.

What this book tries to convey is that taking the exam-

ple of one of the greatest child psychoanalysts of our time,

we may see that it’s not too late, be it for our planet and for

us humans, our careers, our science, our collective spiritualadvancement, and our scientific understanding of nature,

and that we can thrive in a world that is surely more dif-

ferent in ten years from now that it was one hundred years

in the past compared to now.

We are free to continue to feel like victims in this new

reality, and wait for being taken care of by the state, or wemay accept the state, and society, as human creations that

will never be perfect, and venture into creating our lives

and careers in accordance with our true mission, and based

upon our real gifts and talents.

Let me say a last word about this series of books about

great personalities of our time, which I came to call ‘GreatMinds’ Collection. The books within this collection do not

just feature books but authors, you may call them author

reviews instead of book reviews, and they are more exten-

sive also in highlighting the personal mission and autobio-

graphical details which are to note for each author, includ-

ing extensive quotes from their books.


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Chapter OneShort Biography

Dr Françoise M. Dolto (1908-1988) was one of the most

important people I met in my younger years. Our meeting

in 1986 in Paris has been a major trigger for my profes-

sional transformation and personal change.

I had been unhappy with my profession. While my ca-reer as an international lawyer had been well on the way

with all examinations accomplished, including a Doctor of


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Law title from the reputed Geneva University Law Faculty

in international law, I felt my life was empty, without soul

and without a profound meaning. I was at a crossroads as

a career in law would mean to me to live my life only with

my left brain, leaving my right brain out from any impact

upon my professional accomplishments.

While studying law, especially later with my speciali-

zation upon European and International Law was interest-ing, it did not give me emotional satisfaction nor the feel-

ing to help people. It was all about ‘winning a case,’ and

being cunning enough to find a strategy that would con-

vince the court and get the other party into defeat. I was

good at it, though, and during my work as a probationer at

Freshfields, Bruckhaus, Deringer, a reputed international lawfirm in Cologne, Germany, I won all the cases and got a

very good work certificate as a result.

From childhood, a rather emotional and intuitive char-

acter, my desire had been to become a musical teacher, or a

recording engineer in the radio, but my mother found it

better for me to study law, so I followed her advice, and itwas then mostly for my mother that I finalized this rather

long training to become an international lawyer.

In the very year of my enrollment in law school, 1975, I

started reading the collected works of Sigmund Freud and

Wilhelm Reich, and started to study law, music and psy-

chology in parallel. After my graduation in 1982 and myadmission for the doctorate in Geneva in 1983, I began to

meet with psychologists and psychoanalysts in Lausanne


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and Geneva, Switzerland. Surprisingly, I got a quite spon-

taneously positive response from all of them, suggesting to

change my career and become a practicing psychoanalyst.

This interest in the healing professions was intensified

through a psychotherapy I went through in Lausanne with

an American hypnotherapist trained under Milton H. Er-

ickson, and led me to the recovery and healing of my inner

child. I also found at that time the prayer technique devel-oped by Dr. Joseph Murphy, presented and explained in

Murphy’s bestselling book The Power of Your Subconscious

Mind (1963).

Meeting psychiatrists during that important time of

professional transition, I learnt that I had a unique gift for

the mental health profession. As a result, I intensified mystudies of traditional psychoanalysis as well as Transac-

tional Analysis (TA) and became a member of the Swiss As-

sociation of Transactional

In 1986, I met Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) in Paris and

interviewed her. A long correspondence followed up to our

encounter which was considered by curators of the DoltoTrust interesting enough to be published in a book along-

side all of Dolto’s other letter exchanges by Gallimard Pub-

lishers in Paris, in 2005.

The main subjects of our conversation were the sexual

nature of the small child and babies, the need for children

and adolescents to build autonomy as early as possible in

life, and the etiology of pedophilia as a childhood hangup.

Françoise Dolto was strongly in favor of a liberalization of

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adult-child sexual relations and explained to me in detail

why the present state of non-coded relationships in this

grey zone of society have negative consequences for both

the children and the adults involved in such relationships.

While she emphasized that adult-child sexual relations

must remain forbidden within the family and the psycho-

therapeutic setting, she thought that in accordance with

the noble classes in former centuries in Europe such rela-tions are beneficial for children, as they serve as an impor-

tant buffer zone within the parent-child relationships that

otherwise easily becomes codependent and incestuous in

the framework of the modern nuclear urban family.

We also discussed teacher-student relations, and here,

Dr. Dolto expressed her opinion that children form theirpersonal sexual culture in a homosexual identification with

their same-sex teachers, not through acting out on these

desires, of course, but on the internal, psychosexual level.

That means that, in accordance with the Freudian scheme

of child sexuality, the sexuality of the child passes through

three important phases: the oral phase—birth to about 18months—, the anal phase—18 months to approximately 4

1/2 years—, and the genital or oedipal phase—4 1/2 years

to about 7 years, followed by the latency phase and ado-

lescence.

Now, with regard to the genital development of the child

during the oedipal phase, Françoise Dolto stressed the im-portance of teachers being willing to accept the psychic

love transfer upon them by the ‘oedipal’ child. We came to


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discuss this point because I had related to Dr. Dolto my

experiences in pre-schools with children of that age who

had behaved in overly seductive and eroticized ways, and

I could not find a clue to such behavior, as I was sure to not

having myself provoked it with any inappropriate behav-

ior on my part. Dr. Dolto smiled when I finished my report

and said:

—You have done a very good job! Many, mostly femaleeducators and often from rather traditional families tend to

reject children when they behave in such a way, calling it

‘disturbed behavior’ or otherwise, ignoring the often quite

erotic appeal of the oedipal child. Thus, they react to such

advances with aggression, and thereby interfere negatively

with the child’s psychosexual growth. You, perhaps with-out knowing it, have acted appropriately being permissive

in these situations without questioning the children.

We then discussed the pedophilia hysteria in France that

was in full swing in the second part of the 1980s, and I was

amazed at the absolutely refreshing views I got to learn

from this great, remarkable woman. She thought that thepenal code had to be changed, that adult-child sexual rela-

tions had to be socially coded, and that only violent sexual

relations between adults and children should be punish-

able by criminal law.

It was there and then that I learnt about the psychoana-

lytic concept of the ‘Code’ that had been developed by Jac-ques Lacan. The Code means a codification in language of

patterns of behavior that are part of human conduct, with-

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out asking if such patterns of behavior are socially desired or

not. It has been observed by Freudian psychoanalysis that

the Code sets up a structure in the human psyche that is

conducive to law-abiding behavior, while uncoded desires

or forms of conduct tend to generate chaotic behavior, and

crime. Considering psychic dynamics, the necessity for so-

cial policy making to code human desire becomes obvious.

When a particular desire is embraced by the Code it will be

humanized and becomes subject of conscious control.

Desires that are not coded cannot according to psycho-

analysis be sublimated and will instead be repressed and

projected.

After that, we discussed the psychiatric etiology of pe-

dophilia and Dr. Dolto expressed her deep conviction thatan exclusive sexual attraction of adults to children is as

unnatural as homosexuality or lesbianism. She explained

that pedophilia is a ‘childhood hangup’ in the sense that it

is an unconscious search for a ‘missed childhood’ resulting

from overprotection and a narcissistic fixation of parents

that leads to groom their children excessively in a way tochannel them into adult company, and depriving them of

free play with other children. Thus, the adult pedophile is

out to gain access to children in order to heal his own nar-

cissistic wounding, inflicting to him or her by their parents.

Dr. Dolto’s etiology of pedophilia was precisely match-

ing my own research while at that time, the psychiatric lit-erature in general was pretty much in the dark about these

facts and paradoxically sympathized with pedophiles who


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said in public their attraction was ‘inborn.’ It took two dec-

ades to get psychiatry to see that pedophile attraction is as

much an emotional distortion as homosexuality that occurs

in early childhood, and thus by no means ‘inborn.’

I believe these few facts show that Françoise Dolto was

really one of the greatest psychoanalysts of France and one

of the most intuitive and successful and renowned child

therapists worldwide. Her open-mindedness was unusualat her lifetime, while I am convinced that it would be even

more unusual in our time!

Now, let me give you a few biographical details.

Françoise Dolto originated from an upper class family

from Paris and was raised in family with a Catholic back-

ground.

Her psychological lucidity manifested early in life. In

her book La Cause des Enfants (1985) , she reveals that al-

ready at the age of five she could fluently read and write,

and told her parents, after having read a number of books

about medicine, that she wanted to become ‘une doctoresse

pour les enfants’ (a child doctor). After she studied medicine

and worked as a nurse, she developed a strong intellectual

and practical interest for Sigmund Freud and pursued a

psychoanalytic cure with René Laforgue (1894-1962) which

was going over three years. It has to be noted that, at that

time, in France, psychoanalysis was still marginal. Conser-

vative bourgeoisie in France frowned upon the teaching of

Freud, with all its sexual allusions. It was after all thought

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to be an pure invention of the ‘Jewish’ mind only, having

now real relevance to daily life and people’s problems.

Subsequently, she began to work with psychotic chil-

dren and participated in seminars with Spitz, Nacht and

Lowenstein, starting a private practice, next to her continu-

ing work as a hospital psychiatrist. And she focused upon

serving in hospitals, with a specific focus upon institutions.

For it must be seen that at that time there was no realpsychiatric care for mental illness as it was not yet under-

stood that physical and mental illness are different in their

etiology, thus the social reality was quite horrible: patients

with both physical and mental illness were hospitalized in

the same hospitals, while psychiatric care was as good as

non-existent. Hospitals had as good as no funding and thesituation with mentally ill patients was particularly averse

because it was thought that mental illness was a result of

some kind of godly punishment for ‘bad deeds.’

It was a situation, back in 1935, that was for her a time

not of fulfillment but of challenge, a time of trial. All films

and documents from that time show her with a sad face!

And it was during that challenging time that Dr. Dolto

took a very important decision for the rest of her life. She

thought that there was no valid reason to work with adults

for changing the pathology of society because it was too

late for them to change, thus she focused upon children,

very small children and babies actually, as a matter of psy-

chopathological prevention.


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On May 5, 1936, she started her service at the Children

Psychiatry Hospital of Vaugirard, with Professor Georges

Heuyer. She stated in retrospection:

—I learnt from Professor Heuyer what we must not do.

More and more, her psychoanalytic approach focused

on language, influenced by the powerful ideas of Jacques

Lacan (1901-1981) , and based upon the power of the spo-

ken word.From that time, Dolto developed a personal therapy style

that puts the stress on words and syntax, a style that is her

own creation and gave her creative freedom and space in

her psychotherapeutic work with disturbed children.

And it was in this gray area of psychiatry, the complete

and spontaneous healing of psychotic children, who had

been abandoned as incurable by other psychoanalysts and

psychiatrists, that Dolto gained fame in France and later

worldwide; she was in her later years constantly present

on radio and TV.

In fact, Françoise Dolto, at the height of her career, was

so famous in France that every schoolboy would know her

name, and she would run her radio talks and later, her TV

presence, every weekend, consulting families about how to

avoid parental behavior that gets children emotionally dis-

turbed, and how to deal with incestuous desires.

She had become a sort of ‘national guru’ on child psy-choanalysis and child therapy and her fame was certainly

no bluff. The contribution she has made to understanding

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the psychosexual growth of children is unique in psychia-

try, and generally, in world history.

I interviewed Françoise Dolto in 1986, after having vis-

ited La Maison Verte in Paris, a center she had created for

parents and children that mainly served to prepare chil-

dren for greater lapses of time away from their parents and

the early kindergarten experience.

After that enriching visit, I went to her apartment at260, rue Saint-Jacques, near the Panthéon, Paris. After a

short introduction of myself, I told Françoise Dolto about

my work with children, and also my emotional predilection

for children, and the educational work in general. And she

replied that she found it very beneficial for children to be

able to project their oedipal desires on other adults thantheir parents, and parents should be thankful to educators

or generally other adults who are willing to accept chil-

dren’s erotic love transfer upon them; this would greatly re-

duce the abhorrent incestuous tensions within the modern

nuclear urban family.

In her book La Cause des Enfants (1985) , Françoise Doltowrites:

In the nuclear family of today, especially in the town, the

tensions and conflicts are much more explosive if they re-

main under the surface. Today, the number of persons the

child is in contact with is more restricted than before. In the

17th and 18th centuries, the child could transfer his or herincestuous desires on other women who found it funny to

play sexual games with small boys and young people that

they were not the mother of.


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—Françoise Dolto, La Cause des Enfants (1985), p. 29 (Translationmine).

Further, Françoise Dolto writes in Psychanalyse et Pédia-

trie (1971):

All those who study behavior problems, functional organic

troubles, the educators, the doctors in the true sense of the

term, must have notions about the role of libidinal life and

know that sexual education is the grain for the social adapta-

tion of the individual.

— Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (1971), p. 63 (Transla-

tion mine).

No other mental health professional was ever so out-

spoken about the function of the educator as a target for

the oedipal child’s sexual wishes.

While she, as a strictly Catholic believer and defendant

of Freudian mainstream psychoanalysis, ruled out sexual

interaction between educator and student , she encouraged

educators to talk desire (parler désir) with the children in

their care so that desire becomes verbalized and coded in

language.

Dolto found the projection of the child’s gerontophilic

desires upon educators as something natural and healthy,

and even necessary in today’s urban culture.

In her first seminar on child psychoanalysis, Séminaire

de Psychanalyse d’Enfants , Tome 1, she told her participantsthat children constitute their ‘cultural self’ through a homo-

sexual love transfer upon their same-sex teachers, who are,

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other than their parents, representatives of the ‘cultural

map’ children have to build in order to become members

of their society’s cultural heritage:

Children constitute themselves finally in a homosexual rela-

tionship. Archaic drives continue to be heterosexual or ho-

mosexual, with the father or with the mother depending on

the sex of the child, but the genital drives are lived only with

teachers because only with them the child can bring about a

fruit within a relationship of culture and knowledge.

—Françoise Dolto, Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 1(1982), p. 98 (Translation mine).


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Books ReviewedLa Cause des Enfants (1985)

Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (1971)

Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 1 (1982)




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Chapter TwoLa Cause des Enfants


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La Cause des Enfants

Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985

Review

La Cause des Enfants (The Cause of the Child) is perhaps

Dolto’s best book; it is certainly her most well-known. I am

quoting here from the French version, and intently so.

I have had a glimpse into English translations, and was

disappointed. The quotes in my review are translated by

myself from the French original.

No English translation that I found so far accurately

translates the original, and this for reasons that are obvi-

ous. Translators cannot be expected to have expert knowl-edge in fields as esoteric as child psychoanalysis, thus they

cannot be blamed for their misunderstanding publications

that deal with such subjects.

In this book review, I shall focus on the topic of child

sexuality for the simple reason that Dolto is today among

very few authors and child therapy professionals who arenot following our mainstream educational paradigm which

clearly tends to blind out or even suppress the emosexual

nature of the child.

It was precisely for this reason that I contacted Dolto in

1986 and interviewed her in Paris, as in my research on the

roots of violence, I had found a clear correlation between

the repression of the child’s emotional and sexual life and

structural, social and domestic violence against children; a


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letter exchange with Dolto was to follow on the topic of

violence against children and methods of social preven-

tion. To begin with, Françoise Dolto writes:

Sexuality is of very high importance since our birth; it does

not cease to be expressed by the child, day by day, through

the vocabulary of the body. The genital drives enter in inter-

psychic communication which is permanent between human

beings since the beginnings of their life. They are projected

in a language which is the language at the level of ourdevelopment./25

While affirming child sexuality, as I will point out more

in detail below and in the other reviews of her books, Dr.

Dolto was not in favor of giving the child the right of real

love affairs with peers and adults outside of the family.

Logically, from her point of departure, she would have

had to acknowledge the child’s full sexual freedom, such

as for example Wilhelm Reich claimed it in public, many

years before her. But she followed the example of Sigmund

LA CAUSE DES ENFANTS

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Freud who said that psychiatry had to respect the basic setup

of society and as ours is one that prohibits the free sexual

life of children, health care professionals had to limit them-

selves to giving support to children who become neurotic

or schizophrenic through society’s love prohibition.

But interestingly, despite the academic and paradig-

matic clash between Dolto and Reich, on the question of

sex education, their views coincided. Both thought that anysex education comes too late and should not be a matter of

intellectual or school-based learning, but if ever had to be

learnt experientially, in the first years of life.

According to Dolto, the fact that so many people reject

child sexuality has a simple and quite surprising reason:

it’s a loss of memory of events before the Oedipus Complex set in.

Memory in adults erases all that belongs to the pre-oedipal

period. That is why our society has so much difficulty to ac-

cept infantile sexuality. In past centuries there were the

nurses who knew it. Parents, however, ignored it./29-30

This means, in clear text, that the oedipal experience is

traumatic for the child, because otherwise there would not

be loss of memory! For one of the fundamental insights of

psychoanalysis in the true cause of childhood amnesia is that

amnesia is caused by child trauma. While strictly Freudian

psychoanalysis teach that all but auto-erotic sexuality brings

about child trauma, the truth is that the very situation of

the child within the life-denying structure of our consumer

culture is the trigger of child trauma, and not the rather lib-


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erating experience of sexual exchange with people outside

of the nuclear family prison. But note that Dolto has not

said this, and she could possibly not see it because she was

paradigmatically fixated in the Freudian analytic system, and

never really went beyond. While she developed her own

approach to child psychoanalysis, questioning only few

assumptions of Freud’s genitality theory with regard to

female sexuality, she never refuted the basic assumptions

of Freud, and the real angular stone among them being the

theory of the Oedipus Complex. However, she was well con-

scious that the repressive attitude of today’s modern soci-

ety toward restricting the child’s social and erotic life is a

negative factor in the healthy upbringing of children. She

writes:

In the nuclear family of today, especially in urban areas, the

tensions and conflicts are much more explosive, and this is

so because they are underlying. Today, the number of per-

sons a child is in touch with is more restrained than for-

merly. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the child could transfer

their incestuous feelings toward other women than their

mothers who enjoyed to play little funny sex games withlittle boys or young people of whom they were not the

mother./29

Dolto also emphasized in the interview and our subse-

quent correspondence that educators should be conscious

of their erotic attraction to children, and not repress it, as

this very attraction could function as a positive trigger of the

child’s genital development. This is important to know as

there are children who refuse to enter the genital phase.


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These children, in most cases girls, are known to de-

velop a narcissistic fixation, which can potentially cause an

psychosexual attraction to females later on, that is, they

might become Lesbians.

Dolto said that in the eroticized educational relation,

the child could project their incestuous longings on the

educator instead of the parent. Thus, erotic love transfer in

the relationship educator-child was clearly judged positively by Françoise Dolto, while she was vehemently against a

factual acting out of sexual longings involved in any kind

of tutelary relationship. Dolto was convinced that children

constitute themselves in a fantasy love relation, and that

the erotic transfer is allowed only on the level of the un-

conscious, not in real life. This is how psychoanalysis hasforged our lives; we are allowed to constitute ourselves in

fantasy relations, and remain basic masturbators in real rela-

tions, emotionally and sometimes even sexually.

Emotional masturbation is one of the greatest individ-

ual and collective plagues in today’s consumer culture; it is

called narcissism. We are namely conditioned for it from thecradle, through the societal denial of the child-child genital

embrace, and its replacement by the modern society’s gen-

erous permissiveness for us to become prime masturba-

tors.

Dolto reports in her book that still back in the 18th cen-

tury in France women of higher social classes were seen tohave erotic relationships with young boys. She further re-

lates in this book that many women were considered at-


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tractive and charming exactly because they could proudly

small-talk about their sex adventures with young boys, a

fact that nobody at that time found immoral or indecent.

This is further corroborated by descriptions of the habits of

the Royal Family in France, as reported by the doctor of

Louis XIII, Héroard.

—J. Héroard, Journal de Jean Héroard sur l’Enfance et la Jeunessede Louis XIII (1868), Lloyd DeMause (Ed.), The History of Childhood(1974), p. 23 and Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1962).

In general, the repression of intergenerational sexuality

is typically a problem only in our modern industrialized

nations, while there is much wider acceptance to be found

in a large range of other cultures, and thus most of the cul-

tures in the world. It is therefore not taken for granted thatthe majority of the world population would deny the exis-

tence of children’s sexuality in the same way as this is the

case within the Anglo-Saxon world, a fact that many Brit-

ish, Australian or American childhood researchers forget to

consider.

Dolto wrote that if parents are, because of their relig-ious upbringing, not in state to actively encourage children

for their healthy sexual development, they should at least

tell the child clearly, in explicit terms. The verbal exchange

then would greatly help the child to sublimate the desire.

In Freudian terms, this means that the child will have

greater ease to cope with their Oedipus Complex. To repeat

it, Dolto called talking desire (parler désir) such constructive

talk about sexual feelings, which she considered being a


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condition for humanizing desire and for integrating sexual

feelings that our society bans from being lived out.

Personal identity that is said to be the only possible one

according to Western mainstream psychiatry is a derived

identity. It is derived from the parents’ identities. For a boy,

for example, the process will be identification with the fa-

ther, as a primary homosexual identification, during the anal

phase and identification with the mother, as a secondary

heterosexual identification during the genital phase.

True identity is built, according to this system, when

the boy has successfully liquidated the Oedipus Complex by

having developed enough aggressiveness toward the fa-

ther and enough castration of his incestuous desire towardthe mother at the same time. Dolto said in her first work-

shop on child psychoanalysis:


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Q: Why do many French parents never care about the per-

formance of their children in school? How can these children

constitute themselves?

A: Children constitute themselves regularly in homosexual

relationships. Archaic drives continue to be heterosexual or

homosexual, with the father or with the mother depending

on the sex of the child, but the genital drives are lived only

with teachers because only with them the child can bring

about a fruit within a relationship of culture and knowledge.

—Séminaire de Psychanalyse d’Enfants, Tome 1 (1982), p. 98 (Trans-lation mine).

That this system is built on the grave of child-sexuality,

in the sense of child-child sexual activity, is clear from the

start. It was clear to Freud but later on was occulted. Freud

simply commented to Reich: Culture primes! It goes with-

out saying that Freud meant Judeo-Christian culture. He

was convinced that Western culture, by overtaking the

concept of free child sexuality as it is typically part of ma-

triarchal cultures, would be thrown into chaos. Thus, what

Freud’s system has put forward is Oedipal Culture , an in-

cest culture, by discarding out of accepted reality the sex-

ual activeness of the child. The sexually active child does

certainly not fit in the reality of a technology-based society.

—As to the opposite cultural paradigm, as practiced, for example, by the permissive Trobriand culture, see Bronislaw Malinowski, TheSexual Life of Savages in North West Melanesia (1929) and Sex and Re-

pression in Savage Society, (1927/1985).


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The child needed in industrial culture is the child that

is subservient to an eroticized relationship with his or her

parents. Freud certainly did not intend to ‘institutionalize

incest,’ but he made cultural neurosis the norm that primes

over nature, thereby actively engaging the framework of

the fascist and neurotic paradigm of Oedipal Culture.

Among the few psychoanalysts who have admitted

this pitfall of the Freudian system and explanation of cul-

ture were Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and partly also

Françoise Dolto; however, she remained, perhaps because

of her Christian faith, firmly convinced that children, while

being sexual from birth, should not be allowed to live theirsexuality freely with peers or other adults.

She saw and admitted the traumatic effect that this de-

nial has upon children, but, similar to Freud, argued that

our culture was setup in this way by our tradition and that

we had to respect this—or else change and live in another

culture, for example Latin America. She went there oftenand admired especially what she saw forbidden in our cul-

ture: children’s free sexual play from early age.


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And she was really affirmative about it, but only, to re-

peat it, when the cultural setting is favorable to it.

In the past, in rural societies, roles were much more

tightly defined, but on the other hand, social exchanges

were by far more various. It was for example normal that

even smaller children played freely and unobserved in the

streets, in huge plains or even forests.

And, as we can learn from the literature of our poets,

encounters between strangers and little girls were very

common, not only in the country, but also in the major

towns like London or Paris. This was still so at the begin-

ning of the industrialization in London, and in Paris at the

time of Napoleon III. Children were also much more with

adults other than their parents, who assisted the parents in

educating them, as this is the case today.


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As an example of different roles and behavior models

of past societies regarding child sexuality, Dolto references

Jean Héroard and Philippe Ariès and explicates:

Until the age of six, adults behaved with the prince in a per-

verse manner: they played with his penis, allowed him to

play with their genitals and to come in adults’ beds for teas-

ing them. All this was allowed. But suddenly, when he was

six, they dressed him like an adult and he had to behave ac-

cording to the etiquette. Despite the trauma that this couldhave caused, there was something essential he could keep

from these years because he had lived his sexuality with

other people than his mother and his father./28-29

But we do not need to jump almost two centuries back;

in fact, we got valid alternative lifestyle models during the

1960s and 70s for children being able to live their sexual

desires freely within communes, even in such a highly

child-protective culture as the United States. There was high

awareness, at that time, about the need for children to ex-

teriorize their emotions and sexual feelings, and within

communes. The characteristic of communes is namely that

the tight nuclear structure of the modern urban family is

alleviated and a sort of extended family structure is re-

created that allows the child to be parented by a range of

adults who felt and acted like the parents toward the child.

Besides, child-child sexual interaction was actively encour-

aged during these years in early child care in countries like

Norway and Sweden, as it is amply documented.

In my conversations with Françoise Dolto, the main

topic was if a child caretaker could positively value his or her


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erotic feelings for the child , and if these erotic feelings could

bring about a positive transfer toward the child. Dolto af-

firmed the legitimacy of such feelings, provided the care-

taker had been psychoanalyzed , and affirmed their positive

impact on the child’s psychosexual development as they

would virtually draw the child into the genital phase,

thereby counteracting to the rampant narcissism that the

unhealthy codependent clinging to the parent of the same

sex typically brings about in most consumer children to-

day.

Despite her bias that did not allow Dolto to actively

campaign for the sexual freedom of children, and despite

the fact that she openly said that she liked to watch, study

and analyze sexually active children in Latin American cul-

tures, Dolto went farther than most child therapists today

in admitting that our today’s culture and society is among

the most repressive ever in human history regarding the

sexual freedom of the child. She writes:

In order to live the feelings that accompany relationships,

the child is much more restrained today than in olden times;


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they are much more around their fathers and mothers, who

are caretakers and educators. In earlier centuries, parents

were neither caretakers nor educators, but colleagues inwork rites or rites of social representation. Children behaved

like their parents in relation to the world, to space, and there

were many more adults around who replaced the parents at

times, and children could project their incestuous feelings

upon them./29-30

There is certainly stronger repression in our society than inearlier cultures. Also on the level of the child. In olden times,

there were not the same prohibitions for children’s sexual

play in place, except between siblings, and for sexual play

between children and adults, except their parents./30

I have found about the best explanation of narcissism in

this book, and I would say that contrary to the definitionsof narcissism by Alice Miller and Alexander Lowen, it’s a

functional and bioenergetic definition of narcissism. Miller

and Lowen define narcissism as the denial of the true self,

but mystery remains about how this denial comes about.

Dolto explains the why and how, and from her explanation

it becomes clear that narcissism is the very denial to enterthe genital phase and develop a heterosexual identity:

Narcissism, in the beginning, is always to avoid something

new that would go in the sense of growing-out the narcissis-

tic development of the child, depending on his or her gen-

der. The narcissistic child denies this desire to grow along

the lines of their gender, boy or girl, toward the Oedipus.

This is what we always find in child psychoanalysis. It’s

perhaps an obsessional tick I have; I would like you to say


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that. What we found clinically, until now, was that obses-

sional behavior always is an avoidance of growing toward

the Oedipus, or because the child overly focuses on one ele-ment of the Oedipus without wanting to pass to the next. For

it’s also obsessional to cling to one’s mother, no?

I believe that a child cannot live his or her Oedipus by cling-

ing to their mother. It’s an obsessional symptom with one of

the components of the Oedipus—homosexuality or narcis-

sism, including the necessity to be a partial object of themother instead of being castrated from being such an object

and becoming a subject, be it a subject that carries a penis, or

not. If the child does not possess the possibilities or models

of authorization, because of lateral prohibitions, to direct

himself or herself toward a specific genital option—receptor

agent for the girl and emitting agent for the boy—the child

enters an obsessional pattern: ‘Before all, I will cling tomother.’

You all know this day-to-day obsessional symptom that ap-

pears between four and seven years with the child who asks

their mother for the permission to go to the toilet, while the

child has already gained sufficient autonomy. What we have

to study here is not the behavior of the child, but the triangu-lation, as it appears in the discourse, and the role played by

the person who is the pole of identification of the child in

this triangular situation: to know if this third person invites

the child to go beyond his or her pre-genital attitude and

invest his or her genital drives in culture./23-35


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Quotes

Quotes from this book, grouped contextually.

Parents and Princes

! Parents educate their children as princes reigned over theirvassals. (Id., p. 13)

! It’s a scandal for an adult to realize that a child could be theirequal. (Id.)

! In [French] society before 1789, the apprenticeship is the riteof initiation: it’s the birth of the child-individus. He is recog-nized as the subject to the verb ‘to do’ from the moment he isaway from home and able to do useful work. But he then istreated like a production machine, because one can beat himup to break him; he can be scrupulously punished and evenput to death (the father can exercise his right to correct thechild even if he by so doing kills the child). (Id., pp. 17-18).

! It is significative that over some capitals in cathedrals, thepeasants are represented according to the morphology of achild’s body, with the proportion of the much larger head ofthe child in relation to the rest of the body. Here the artistserved the intention of the prince. The inverse, vassals, poorpeople, children, same kind of portrait, same kind of fight.(Id., p. 18).

Fear and Death

! Nobody can ever resolve castration fear. This fear nourishesour idea of death. (Id., p. 23).

! In the past, death was a familiar experience; we have dis-carded it out of the life of children, once again with the sameprotection mania which consists of hiding all from the youngthat adults are afraid of: old age, sickness, and death. (Id., p.

87).

! Children are in no way afraid of death. Why do parents notwant their children being in contact with death, given chil-dren are not afraid of it? (Id., p. 90).


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Permissive Cultures vs. Our Culture

! With Blacks, there is no adult who would not tell a little boy—before the initiation: ‘I will grab your penis and cut it off.’This is part of social life, and customary rites. And the childwill not believe it. He is glad that somebody talks about hisorgan. In our society they say: ‘Oh, one must never saythings like that, that traumatizes the child!’ Well, it all de-pends on the way of saying it; needless to add it should bewith a grain of humor. It is sane to put words on somethingthat creates anxiety with young boys. (Id., p. 23).

The Importance of Language

! All what is not voiced creates a certain danger of confusionand this again may lead to incest. It is important to tell ayoung boy that he cannot take the place of the father andthat there are sexual relations in the couple that he must notdisturb, and that he will know himself once he marries awoman other than his mother. (Id., p. 24).

!

The aggressiveness of certain individuals of our race isrooted in a basic ignorance of their origins because we knowthat they have not received a verbal explanation frommother or father that initiated them into the truth that it isdesire that was the root cause of their coming into the world.In most cases, if ever, children are instructed that they are thefruit of some kind of body function, but they are not toldthat they owe their existence to two beings who desired eachother, the desire namely that creates life and the enigma in-herent in it. (Id., p. 128).

About Sex Education

! Anyway, this information comes much too late because oursexuality is very important since we were born; it doesn’tcease to express itself in the child, day by day, in the vocabu-lary of the body. The genital drives create an interpsychiccommunication which is permanent in all humans sincetheir birth. They are projected into language at every stage of

our development. During puberty, when a feeling of respon-sibility is cognized, the psyche, which is a metaphor of thesoma, would be mature enough for the sexual act. (Id., pp.25-26).


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The Lost Knowledge about Child Sexuality

! Memory with adults erases all recall of the pre-oedipal time.This is why in our society so many people have so muchpain to accept child sexuality. In past centuries it was onlythe wet nurses who knew about it. The parents ignored it.The nurses knew because they actually lived together withthe children, while the parents in families of the bourgeoisieand even in rural areas, were distant from their children.People who cared for children knew that there is some kindof behavioral expression that is prior to language. WhenFreud talked about child masturbation, adults screamed, but

wet nurses said: ‘But of course … all children do that.’ Why,then, did they not talk about it? It’s because for most adults,children were on the level of nice pets or of crude animals,depending on the love one felt for them. (Id., p. 28).

! The childhood of Louis XIII, as Philippe Ariès showed it, is agood example for a young life where no prohibitions wereset. Until the prince was 6-years old, adults would behaveperversely with him: they used to play with his penis, andallowed him to play with their genitals and come in their

beds, for teasing them. All this was allowed. But suddenly,when he was 6, they dressed him like an adult and he had to

behave like an adult in accordance with the royal etiquette.(Id.) (Quoting Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sousl’Ancien Régime (1975), p. 145.)

! Despite the child trauma that could have occurred, theprince had nonetheless an essential benefit of all of this be-cause in his first years of life, he could live his sexuality with

other people than his parents. He had a greater opportunitythan anybody else in that respect, despite the precociousclothing as an adult. But behold, this example is only validfor the rich classes of society. In lower classes of society, wehave to ask how the child of that time could repress his in-cestuous desires, and sublimate them? (Id., pp. 28-29).

! In old tales and legends, Little Red Riding Hood could po-tentially also be a boy, eaten by the wolf and the wolf beingan old satyr. We know that little boys also have to fear the

satyrs. (Id., pp. 43-44).


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The Sinful Child

! The Church has not little contributed to the assumption thatchildren are born in sin and that their vulnerability may at-tract bad spirits. Did the Church not teach that even baptismcannot erase original sin? The child thus is born with a clear

branding; it is branded with his disgrace, and his weakness.It is not trusted, if it is not outright frowned upon. As he issuch, he must be remodeled, he has to be completely undoneand redone once again, in order to get out of the claws ofevil. (Id., p. 58)

The Prison of Modern Childhood

! Given this double enclosure – in the family and in theschool, the space conceded to town children today is to be-come smaller and smaller. And what remains of it is lockedup, tagged and staked with prohibitions. (Id., p. 59).

! No more detours, no more meetings ‘on the way’. The mod-ern mother picks up their children by driving to the school,

or they are transported in busses as one delivers registeredletters. (Id.)

! Modern society has modeled and destroyed more and morethe space where children can explore their bodies, and imag-ine and know the risks of pleasures. The enclosure of chil-dren reproduces hypocritely the concept of prison life. Thediscretionary power with which people today restrict thecivilization of our small members is a racism of the uncon-scious adult exercised in the meeting with the race of the

child. (Id., p. 63).

! It seems to me that all in society follows the example ofpower. The wealthy burgers want to live in their small worldthe prerogatives of the price. The workers want to live likewealthy burgers. This is not class fight, it’s an idealized ex-ample: power is idealized. (Id., p. 66).

Our Obsession with Safety and Overprotection

! We want safety for our children. Be it. But for what reason?… If the price for safety is that there is no more imagination,no more creativity, no more freedom, and while I believe thatsafety is a primordial longing, we must not overdo it. Too


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much of safety suffocates desire and the risk which is neces-sary for feeling ‘alive’, and for questioning oneself. Adultswho are obsessed with safety to a point where they lose allimagination, have they not been themselves children who, intheir first years, in their first weeks, have been gruesomelylacking out on safety? (Id., p. 67).

! They punish, they scold, they beat the child sometimes rightat a moment where conversation would have been of thegreatest value. The next time he will put himself in thissituation, he will have exactly the same difficulty to avoidthe incident, because the risk was not cognized by him and

because one assumes that he is not able to ensure his ownsafety. It is toxic to make a child down who has made a dan-gerous experience, be it exposure to cold, to heat, or the riskto get the flu. Same is true for hunger. The obligation to eat,to sleep. Today, children do not know that they are hosted asall other humans because they are overprotected and de-prived of the opportunity to make their own experiences.The result of all of this …? Children in modern society donot grow any more in safety. (Id., p. 77).

! This is a paradoxical situation in a society that wants to in-sure us against all risks for the result is that our children andadolescents are more and more vulnerable because of their

being deprived, virtually on a daily basis, of valuable expe-riences. (Id., pp. 77-78).

! One may ask oneself if depriving a child of ‘dangerousgames’ is not a method to after all incite children to lose their

joy of life, fall into depressions or search out danger deliber-

ately? All these norms that dictate children have to play safegames lead at the end of the day to dispensing parents fromassuming their tutelary role at the side of the child. (Id., p.81).

! All testimony boils down to this: the Xingu natives fromAmazonia never beat their children. One day a child put fireat a house. The fire spread very fast and soon the whole vil-lage was destroyed. The incendiary child is not beaten. He is

given the surname ‘fire captain’. And we to remind us of thestory of Cain and Abel. Cain murdered his brother Abel andwas declared by God to be responsible for the safety in thetowns. (Id., p. 82).


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! It is a fact that we bestow upon children safety through theimpossibility to take risks, and it’s exactly by doing this thatwe deprive children of safety. Safety given by parents andwhich was not achieved without their assistance does notprovoke in the child a responsible attitude toward his or her

body: self-identity comes with the right to take the initiative,and being compensated by responsibility for self-defense inthe service of the body’s integrity in all relationships withothers, since the earliest moments of childhood. (Id., p. 83).

! It seems that all modern technologies that are potentiallyuseful for children are actually used against children because

adults want to conserve their discretionary power overthem. They are themselves so infantilized that they in turninfantilize their children. (Id., p. 83).

! It’s not any instruments society has developed that are dan-gerous, it’s the attitude of adults to profit from these modali-ties in order to intimidate children and exert a sadistic powerover them. These modern gadgets give us a good consciencein that they create the illusion that children today are morelucky than formerly, and that they enjoy more freedom andautonomy. While what we have here is coercive education, anarrow-minded education, which is the new plague of so-called civilized societies. (Id.)

Genius and the Inner Child

! Picasso draws like a child, but a child that has acquired thetechnical and instrumental mastery and perfection of theadult artist, who is able to reproduce forms. (Id., p. 92).

The Value of Losing Illusions

! In Japan, the master imposes at 8-year old boys a very hardchallenge: in front of the entire class, he punishes a studentwho is among the first in the class, for a mistake he has notcommitted. ‘You have stolen money from my pocket’, or‘You have cheated’. (Id., p. 92)

! After the punishment, he explains about his ‘judicial error’.‘You must know that the best of masters, the best of fathers,can be unjust. You must learn to endure the injustice of theworld while remaining a just man.’ It happened that the boywho was submitted to the challenge became ill. This test has


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two purposes: it teaches to not engage in idolatry, the cult ofa second father, or an unfailing hero. At a certain point inlife, one must lose one’s illusions, and learn to survive thetreason of one’s ideal, as well as affective deception. Thisreminds of the humiliating techniques practiced by Indiangurus toward their disciples. (Id., p. 94).

The Value of Subjectiveness

! Science doesn’t work in the service of the child. It serves theestablished order, public instruction, police. Or it serves sci-ence itself. Research for the sake of research. (Id., p. 95)

! The ‘child’ doesn’t exist … There is public discourse aboutTHE CHILD, while every child is absolutely not the same asanother, regarding their inner life, in the way they structurethemselves according to their feelings and according to theparticularities of the adults who bring them up. (Id., pp. 103-104).

! It’s the time of the neurosciences. And their forceful arrival is

disquieting. In the perspective of this discipline all is alignedwith the development of intelligence, while it is affectionthat gives meaning to human intelligence. Intelligence assuch does not exist. Physical health as a standalone thingdoesn’t exist. It’s always a complex system that construes aperson and makes for their uniqueness. (Id., p. 104).

! I wonder if finally, the post-Piaget period doesn’t risk to beterrible intellectualizing. The neurosciences are putting a

much too strong focus on objectiveness, which goes againstall our efforts to emphasize the subjectiveness of everybody:they would better get children interested in that instead offocusing their interest too early upon standardized schoolrequirements. (Id., p. 105).

Questioning Cultural and Scientific Conditioning

! We have to fear that the present strong focus upon educa-tional literature, encyclopedias and guide books invites cou-

ples of our time to adopt norms and rules, not to say miraclerecipes. That also is a manichean conditioning because edu-cational systems are contradicting one another; young par-ents are not instructed to modulate, to interpret and to listento their intuition: your child is born by you and as you are


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yourself, be honest, and put your feelings in words for it’syour sincerity that your child most needs. Our languagetoday has become purely conceptual, purely detached. It’sperhaps simply the death of a civilization. (Id., pp. 112-113).

! Today, there is rather a regression to be made out in com-parison with the 17th century, in that there are no more wetnurses. All has become mechanical. Whoever is the nurse,she has become mechanized in the sense that from about 21/2 months of the child, she is supposed to give the child ameat bouillon; there is anonymity and neutralization in nu-trition, in the name of Science. And Science considers the

child but as an animal for observation and not as a personwho’s got feelings; it doesn’t inquire into what a child ex-presses. (Id., p. 114).

! Einstein, a retarded school boy, almost mute, daydreaming;his parents loved him like that, without knowing that he wasintelligent, and accepting that he was unable to pass anexam. He was the ‘poor little guy’ who will never be goodfor anything. But it’s perhaps that, which has at the sametime stimulated his intelligence? Who knows? If Einsteinhad been different, already recognized as a child prodigy, hewould never have become Einstein. (Id., p. 117).

About Computers and Videogames

! The media culture presents a certain positive aspect in thatthese games are not directed by a human will that wants toimpose itself upon the sensibility of those who play thegames. Young people realize that their mind can be as sharp

as the mind of an adult. And yet the remainder of all of thatis nonetheless that affectivity is completely absent in thesegames and the pleasure one can derive from them is a purelyintellectual pleasure; sensitivity is made the hero of the finaloutcome: one is right or wrong. (Id., p. 118).

! Games that children liked were those they could identifythemselves with; when they were out of use, it was like onelost a friend. The electronic game is not a friend, it’s an in-

strument. We have seen that already with the talking dolls,the dolls that pissed (we don’t know why): more the func-tions of a certain object are programmed, less the child canlove it because he cannot project an affective life upon it; it’sa functional life, not an affective life. The doll that repeats,


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upon request, to talk what is on the magnetic tape, is some-thing non-human, repetitive, not like a human who pro-duces sentiments and thoughts all day long. Much to thecontrary, those new games will accentuate animal behavior,as a conditioned reflex, rather than enable a relational ex-change. (Id., p. 120).

! However blind man’s buff, which is outside of modern mo-res, was still a game for adults in the 18th century, as one cansee it on many prints … (Id., p. 120).

Thoughts on Masturbation

! Masturbation plays a very important role in the relations between mother and child, father and child, as in man-woman relations; there is an enormous amount of veiledmasturbation in the so-called love game; fornication in thesense of letting go a certain focalized excitation is a form ofduo-masturbation. This relaxation that can be brought aboutwithout using one’s hands, then is facilitated by an object in

between child and mother; for example we see little retarded

ones rendered retarded by pathological family relations, andwho can masturbate only by using a pillow, never by usingtheir hands. (Id., p. 128).

! Even if a child has not been ‘planned’ to come, and was notwanted by his genitors, every being, by the very fact to be

born demonstrates that it was him who desired to be born.And we need to welcome him in this way: ‘You have always

been born by an unconscious desire … and, so much themore that you were not consciously wished and desired by

your parents, you are stronger because of your own desire.When your parents made love, they were not aware that youwould be born as a result, it was a surprise for them, and itshows that it was your own desire that got you to be here,and that you made it through. It’s the child-desire: hewished to be born, while his parents ignored it; he is alwaysdesire, often love, ‘embodied’. Thus, every human being isthe incarnated verb (which is exactly what is said about Je-sus Christ). Every human being deserves this very definitionat the moment of their conception. (Id., pp. 128-129).

! Children who were desired and planned to come, after along waiting time of their parents, do not have this strongsecret life force because they satisfy the desire of their par-


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ents. It’s the surprise-child, the one that was not expectedwho is the prototype of the richest human who lives from hisown vital dynamics, without anybody waiting for his com-ing into the world. (Id., p. 129).

! Sometimes I think that original sin could possibly be thathumans have eaten their own children when they had noanimals to eat and were starving of hunger; so they mighthave got the idea to eat their children … and today childrencan feel they could eat their mothers, and being eaten by her.(Id.)

! When the fear of death is overwhelming, children encountera resistance in the social group that becomes more and morestringent. This is absurd and tragic because we know that weare alive as a function of knowing that we will die. It’s thevery definition of life: this living creature is alive because itwill die; she is born, she develops herself, and she dies. It’sthus by death that life is defined. And we are afraid of whatdefines us as alive. (Id., p. 136).

!

The fear to die, finally is the fear of living. (Id., p. 138).

! Whoever is devoted to listening to the answers of children isa revolutionary spirit. The other so-called revolutions willnever change anything. (Id.)

! Creative space for seeking one’s own direction disappearsmore and more. Any conduct that reflects initiative orimagination is going to be blocked. ‘No, no, in this direction

you have to go … It’s like that … Do not search for your way by yourself, it is here.’ (Id., p. 139).

! What is lacking in today’s education is the function of initia-tion; the collective rite of passage. (Id., p. 145).

! Racism that opposes Blacks and Whites bleaches out underother forms [of racism] in our old Europe: sexism, and adult-child racism. (Id., p. 146).

! Whatever type of society we are in, and the kind of educa-tion that is practiced, man always falls in the same trapwhich is to confound guilt and responsibility. Ambivalentlanguage nourishes the confusion: What is natural is at the


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same time pure and impure, the savage is good and danger-ous. Knowledge brings victory and sin. (Id., p. 147)

! Psychoanalysis has an important role to play in a welfaresociety and a world that, in the name of so-called science,removed the sacred, which was the source of love and hope.(Id.)

! The unconscious corresponds to the mystery of being, theunknown, the unspeakable. We turn away from it as we fleethe sacred because we are afraid of it. It’s the unknown of areality out there, which is beyond reality. … In truth, illness

cannot be dissociated from an interaction of the soma withthe psyche, which results in an excessive biochemical waste,which creates a momentary need for a trace element in themetabolism. (Id.)

! Since centuries, the discourse about the child focuses muchmore upon children’s immaturity than upon their potential,their gifts and natural genius. The scientific course suffersfrom the same bias. (Id., p. 150).

! It is precociously smart children, but not considered as such,who are not known to be valid exchange partners who, be-cause they are lacking involvement in language and are de-prived of substantial and subtle sensory relations, sounds,forms, words, music, toys, movements, that appear after afew months as retarded, psychotic, autistic. Their symbolicfunction – the language of the heart – has not been inte-grated in their body-to-body relations which serve necessaryphysical survival. (Id., p. 152).

! Laws, social inclusion, vaccination do all not prevent thechild in industrial society from the risk of alienation andthey do not take him out of his condition. He shares the infe-riority of his age group. Despite himself, he belongs to a sub-continent. (Id.)

! Despite appearances, the social condition of the child hashardly changed since 4000 years (Sumer). When we talk

about the cause of the child, we are talking about illusions ofprogress. (Id., p. 153).


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! They talk a lot about him [the child], but to him, they don’ttalk. (Id., p. 155).

! When adults want to understand children, it’s most of thetime for dominating them. They should listen to them, andmore often than not they would find out that children havethe key in hands for love, hope and faith in life despite alltheir suffering and social dramas inside the family or outsideof it; they share in the challenges of life, each child accordingto their age and natural talents. (Id. p. 177).

! Truthful language has healing power but it is difficult to

practice for one has to accept oneself with humility, one goestoward what is essential, without being proud. (Id., p. 183).

! This is the classical therapeutic work, perhaps even withchildren who already talk, but only if the child himself wantsto be helped. For those who do not [yet] talk, I have found away of working with other than verbal means of expression,

but which are associated with language – drawings, model-ing work, mimicked fantasies with objects (free play) be-

cause they help the child to relive their past in the transferrelationship with the analyst. It’s this explanation of a reacti-vated past of which the analytic work consists. (Id., p. 190).

! Literature can only be narcissistic because people write books because they suffer from desires they cannot satisfyand they satisfy them by writing down their fantasies. (Id.,p. 196).

!

The child has an intelligent understanding of truth, in anycase of sincere affective exchanges. If an adult aggresses achild physically, it’s because he doesn’t meet the child on thelevel of language; because he doesn’t consider the child as ahuman being. If we disown our vegetative beingness, it’s

because our intellect and operational mode of living are in-flated: one approaches a plant for cutting it, for embellishingthe garden, etc. … but this plant fears the gardener … how-ever the gardener who doesn’t aggress the plant for hispleasure, the plant won’t be afraid of. (Id., p. 201).

! Adults repress their inner child, while they take care of beingfeared by children, so that they obey. This educational ethosis wrong. It’s out to replicate a society for adults only, whichmeans a society that has got the inventive, creative, auda-


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cious and poetic force of childhood amputated, thereby pre-cluding its renewal. (Id., p. 202).

! We refuse to talk to our babies, and yet, when we look atthem we identify with our mothers when we were ourselves

babies. This is what parents spontaneously do; they identifythemselves with their parents while they identify themselveswith their baby. They have a narcissistic relationship withthemselves within an ‘imagined’ baby instead of having arelationship with that baby, in reality. This relationship theyhave with themselves, they objectify it in relations with an-other adult to whom they talk about the child, without talk-

ing to the child. (Id., pp. 203-204).

! We are not born Cro-Magnon, with a virgin memory. Not atall. All the memories of our parents, of our ancestors, arewithin us. We are, in our beingness, the representatives of astory, even if we ignore it, from which point we are going tomake our evolution. (Id., p. 206).

! We are cultivating fear which becomes the basis of educa-

tion. This anxiety is at the origin of a lot of disturbances to befound with adolescents. (Id.)

! To reject another means to reject a part of oneself./216

The Nature of Desire

! When desire is always satisfied, it dies./226

Children, a Special Race?

! The rhythm of the child’s needs and desire is countered byobsessional behavior of adults. One imposes upon the childan arbitrary rhythm, one that opposes his own (…) Eachperson’s own rhythm should count, and not one’s age. Justas machines, children are programmed. /213

! We are to a point afraid of sexual exploitation of children by

perverts that adults are no more allowed to receive run-away or homeless children. S.O.S. Children has been sup-pressed by law. And yet these ‘lost dogs’ had a place to go etwhere they could talk. The directors of such institutions mayhave allowed to be seduced by youngsters, or may have se-


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duced them. And afterwards? It’s worse to be seduced byone’s parent than by a person outside of the family./215-216

! It’s a wrong question because the psychic frontier betweenchildhood and adulthood is not determined. Who can saythat he or she is really adult?/228

! It’s a big fallacy to consider humans in their childhood as aspecial race. To lock them up in a magic circle is to sterilizethem./230

The Inner Child

! Mankind, at their age of adulthood, is a strange species inthat they can’t evolve because of their fear of death and theirparallel instinctive fear of life. When there is fear of death,people cling to their mere bodily nature. This fear and thedesire to preserve the body prevent people from living fully.(…) It is only those few who, during their lifetime, won’tsilence their inner child that are going to create somethingnew and advance things, by their leaps, their discoveries,

their emotions that they bring toward society; these are go-ing to open another window, and another door. But theseinventors, these innovators are isolated, they are marginal-ized, and always threatened by psychosis. For the rest, youcan see it with your own eyes: there is a whole literature, awhole discourse about genius and madness. Finally, societyhas inscribed it in our subconscious mind, this idea of theartist as well as the researcher being met with suspicion./202

! When one comes out of analysis, one establishes a link be-tween the present ego and the inner child, both having theright distance from one another./204

! There is more than a distance. One is no more interested inoneself, neither the present ego nor the one of the past. Thiswas one of the major results of my analysis: my past was nomore of interest. It’s like photos: once in a while one thinks

back … of the family. But oneself … is dead./205

! It’s true that children are poets. Adults can be, too, but onlyif they have kept their inner child alive./229


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Children Are Unafraid

! The child doesn’t try to find out about the future; he makesthe future, he creates it. He is not cautious. He makes noeconomies. He toils according to his desire, assuming theconsequences. /232

! Children reveal in dramatic situations, in their familiaritywith death, and major drama that they possess a real hu-manity. There is determination, power, and affirmed person-ality to be found with children who suffer from leukemia.The upcoming death that threatens their organism, the pres-

ence of danger not only show sublime lucidity in the face ofthe illness, but also an astounding perception of life. It’s notthe illness that gives them this power. The illness only accen-tuates it, reveals it, and this testifies for the potential thatevery being has since their birth./233

! Here is the difference: the adult thinks; the child does notthink, he is./234

! How many children have chosen a name for the girl or boy before their birth! Then the child is born, and they give himanother name. The first time their newborn cries and the firsttime they look at him result in their foreseen name not corre-sponding to that intimate and profound relationship for thenames come from the unconscious, from very far. The firstname of the child should be born from this touching encoun-ter. Parents who give the premeditated name almost alwaysrob the child of their essential first relationship. And weshould tell parents: ‘Think of names, but wait for the baby’s

first cry. When you have seen him, in that very moment youare going to realize that your child incites you to give to himthe name he likes to have, n

Documents

Françoise Dolto and Child Psychoanalysis