This book is Françoise Dolto's 1939 medical thesis and is dedicated to medical practitioners, paediatricians, and parents without prior knowledge of psychoanalysis. Françoise Dolto'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.
Terminology Dolto, Françoise
Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics,
2013
Book Chapter
This chapter is devoted to the account of "the nuts and bolts" of the adult psyche and provides a brief description of the personality. A psychic phenomenon can be unconscious and effective. The set ...of thoughts that we can have in mind at a given moment constitute the conscious. S. Freud proposes the hypothesis that all psychic phenomena tend towards becoming conscious. The originality of the psychoanalytic method is to permit the observation of an individual's behaviour to be as objective as possible. The patient's relationship to the therapist is outside social space and time; the patient does not know the therapist as a social being and knows nothing of his personal opinions and reactions; the patient will never hear from him the slightest value judgements. Psychoanalysis points to the predominant role of unconsciously active ideas; the driving forces that an individual alleges to justify his actions while the real motivation escapes him are called rationalisations.
Observations Dolto, Françoise
Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics,
2013
Book Chapter
Firstly, we are going to present some drawings collected during treatment of the cases which we will be speaking about. We will begin with two examples of dreams demonstrating how the conflicts ...expressed look alike, regardless of the shape in which they are expressed, and especially regardless of the age of the subjects.
The children will be talking about were, for the most part, sent for treatment at the Hospital Bretonneau by Dr Pichon, clinical director and himself a psychoanalyst. A special clinic—once a week— ...brought together abnormal children, retarded ones and those presenting neurotic or personality problems; this clinic became well known to the parents, and also especially to the schoolteachers, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris. The psychoanalytic diagnosis is subsequently fine-tuned during treatment; the initial diagnosis is a diagnosis of symptoms. If someone unacquainted with psychoanalysis listened talking to the child, he would often believe that were speaking nonsense, pointless words, that were talking "rubbish", that were "playing" like a child with little patient. The understanding of the psychoanalyst goes right to the heart of the subject—the burning question for a three-and-a-half-year-old child who is beginning her Oedipus complex.
The fear of death is to be seen in many children. Equally, the fear of death is "rational", but normally exists only when one is confronted with its imminence. The death wish having been enacted, the ...uprooting of the pole took on, through displacement, an intolerable intensity. The actual death—followed by an actual castration—("feared by Paul")—(uprooting of the pole from the ground) brought Paul the immediate threat of libidinal death: this is anxiety. From this arises the symptoms of death: pained facial expressions, annihilation of the affective drives even to the depth of the vegetative passive oral stage, and the freezing of the respiratory muscles. Castration anxiety is a turmoil of libidinal frustration. It is triggered by a conflict between drives, aggressive and passive, at the service of sexuality, prohibitions coming from the external world or from the superego. But the reason for the anxiety and the conflict remain unknown to the conscious part of the ego.
The Oedipus complex Dolto, Françoise
Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics,
2013
Book Chapter
In normal cases, a child of three is no longer a little savage; he is already "civilised", he already has a personality, habits, favourite activities, a way of thinking, and extensive emotional ...potential channelled into relationships within his family circle and when all goes well with a few children of his own age, both girls and boys. The unease that the child experiences when he discovers the absence of the penis in girls initially induces him to disregard the evidence of his own eyes. Clearly, the Oedipus complex is unresolved, can coincide with physiological and genital sexuality, heterosexual in the sense of being penetratingly phallic, without consideration and tenderness towards the sexual object. Consideration and tenderness are only available towards with or without active homosexuality. To please mother, the boy attempts to submit his libido to this mutilation, the result of which is over-activation of his castration anxiety, because the second factor on which it depends is being reinforced.
Enuresis Dolto, Françoise
Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics,
2013
Book Chapter
One can wonder at the frequency of enuresis. This symptom, which can be thankful for, brings children whose neuroses would otherwise be ignored, has in itself more than one meaning. At the very ...least, it signifies stagnation at or the return to the sadistic urethral stage, which is the one preceding the phallic stage. Enuresis can also indicate a regression to an even more archaic stage. Also enuresis has, in some cases, to be respected, despite the demands of the parents, and the conscious desire of the child, for as long as it takes to help the libido of the child evolve to the urethral sadistic stage, the dawn of the phallic stage. One can see that the symptom of enuresis has only a relative diagnostic role. In itself, with no knowledge of any accompanying emotional behaviour, it is impossible to make a sound therapeutic plan.
