Book Review Essay: “Dolto and the Fruits of Castration” A Review of “Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent”

In the 2012 bestseller, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, Pamela Druckerman, an American writer living in Paris and navigating the gulf of differences between parenting in France and the US, wonders how and why French parents seemingly follow a unified approach to childrearing. She portrays American parents as overrun with contradictory philosophies and advice that leave them ever in the wrong, ever guilty, and ever racked with anxiety. How is it that French parents move with such know-how, clarity, and perspective, trusting in their children and choosing not to indulge in spiraling worry and guilt? 

The primary source of French parenting philosophy, she discovers, is psychoanalyst Francoise Dolto. Out of print in English at the time Druckerman is writing and largely unknown in the US by non-psychoanalysts, Dolto, she learns, is a kind of national hero in France. Getting her start in the 1930s and 1940s as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Dolto made it her mission to transmit her own brand of psychoanalysis to the French people through media outlets that would reach the masses. Druckerman compares Dolto to her American contemporary, Dr. Spock, and his 1946 manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which she observes is an exhaustive attempt to catalogue nearly all possible conditions and afflictions that might befall a child, offering a medicalized model of child development and interventions (despite being Spock being an analyst himself) in which parents are the masters of knowledge about their children. 

In contrast, Dolto leaves medicine aside and brings holistic and humanist concepts to her psychoanalytic theory of development. At the heart of Dolto’s practice and proselytizing are ideas centered on children as rational subjects deserving of a listening ear and of adults who speak the truth. It is the responsibility for parents to know and hold the limits and laws of family and society, to communicate these laws, and to acknowledge that as adults, they are subject to them, too. For Dolto it is the duty of parents to usher their children into a symbolic world of relations through direct and respectful speaking about the facts of life. It is also their duty to embody their gendered roles with authority and clarity. As long as all that’s positioned correctly—voila!—the complexities of childrearing and psychosexual development don’t deviate and are straightforward (in every sense) for parent and child alike. 

Though Dolto’s work remained generally unknown in the English-speaking world, a curious exception was the publication of Dominique: Analysis of an Adolescent, which was first translated in English in 1973 (two years after its publication in France) and given a glowing introduction by American child psychologist, Robert Coles, who said this of Dolto’s work:

For some time Americans have seen France through the eyes of her psychologically sophisticated novelist-philosophers (Camus, Sartre) or her filmmakers—like Truffaut, who has had a keen eye out for the disorder and sorrow youths like Dominique experience. Now Françoise Dolto arrives to show how subtle and yet solid an experience psychoanalysis can be for such youths. What is more, after she gives us, so to speak, Dominique and herself, a wayward youth and a compassionate analyst, she tells us what we need to do if we are to keep at a minimum the number of Dominiques among us. Her remarks are especially useful and valuable at this time as we talk about day-care centers and “new” means of rearing children. Child psychoanalysts like her and Anna Freud are few in number, quiet and thoughtful in manner. They are not the ones to grab headlines and make strong political cases before the public or government officials. But they do know what children must have, lest they wither psychologically and spiritually. One can only hope that they will be listened to as carefully as they have learned to listen. (p. ix)

Cole’s celebration of Dolto and of the case of Dominique reflects the predominant reaction to the book, which for years was read as an exemplar of the potential of analytic work. But long out of print and clumsy and strange in its translation of psychoanalytic vocabulary, the first English edition fell to the wayside. In 2025 Divided Publishing issued a new, more polished English translation, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent, following a resurgence of interest in Dolto’s work. Recent English publications of her work include 2023’s The Unconscious Body Image, an explication of her theory of psychical development, and 2013’s Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics, Dolto’s 1939 medical thesis written with the intention of introducing psychoanalytic concepts to everyday families. 

The reception of Dolto’s clinical work and thinking in my own clinical circles has reflected the air of reverence and awe that Druckerman encounters as an American in Paris and that Cole describes over 50 years ago, but as with any influential figure, Dolto’s history and legacy is complex, and even less well-known to non-French readers. At first pass, she is fabled for being an outsider in French psychoanalysis, along with Lacan, after both were excised from the IPA in 1964. Their similar upbringings both as children and as psychoanalysts, as well as their decades of friendship as outsider colleagues with their own cultural followings, are well-documented in Roudinesco’s biography, Jacques Lacan. In this biography, which devotes a whole chapter to the relationship between Lacan and Dolto, Roudinesco describes British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott’s take on Dolto, a figure to whom Dolto is likened often, as both were known for their signature styles with children and with the public. When Winnicott was tasked with evaluating Dolto’s work for the IPA in 1964,

He concluded that it was very acceptable and said it should be continued within the context of the SFP. But he disapproved of her teaching; he said she lacked method and produced “uncontrolled transference” from both patients and training analysands. She was advised to avoid too much contact with the young, so as not to “influence” them unduly. (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 245). 

The positive transference to Dolto lives on for many and for reasons that can be found within her vivid clinical writing and what it still transmits, and at the vibrant community institution for young children and their families, La Maison Verte, that she established in 1979 and that is replicated internationally to this day. The negative transference requires more legwork to uncover, to some extent, though its seeds can also be found in the same clinical writing and its theoretical foundations.  Robert Bates’s assiduous 2022 historical biography, Psychoanalysis and the Family in Twentieth-Century France: Françoise Dolto and Her Legacy, examines Dolto’s formation and the social forces that shaped her work and thinking. It also sheds light on what Bates describes as the “paradoxes and ambivalences” of her life history and oeuvre, particularly the gender and diagnostic norms she both codified and subverted throughout her career.

These critiques can be and are lobbed at psychoanalysis as a discipline, especially when examining its mid-20th century development. Practitioners and theorists like Dolto can be marked as representatives of the worst of analytic theory if one focuses narrowly on certain facets. What Dolto works through with her clinical technique to generative outcomes, even in the case of Dominique, shows a know-how with theory that is not restricted to definitions of old categories, but open to new formulations and configurations. It is a know-how that emerges through the struggles with her own position as a daughter that brought her to define what a woman is for herself. 

Born in 1908, Dolto was one of two daughters among seven siblings. Wealthy, conservative, and Catholic, the family was tight-knit and the girls carefully monitored, with the purpose of education to round them out for a desirable marriage. The home was lively and intellectual and Dolto was exposed to current scientific literature in her father’s library, including the publications of Freud. WWI was the backdrop of her early years and the call for women to work outside the home, including Dolto’s mother who served as a nurse, gave a vision of alternative paths for girls of her generation. After the war ended, women were expected to return to their places at home, but desires burned beyond the family hearth for many young women, who fought for opportunities to advance their studies and establish careers. Dolto’s mother opposed her daughter finishing her baccalaureate, but with her father’s support the young Dolto prevailed and was in the first cohorts of women to graduate (alongside another dutiful daughter, Simone de Beauvoir). The battle ensued anew when Dolto voiced her desire to study medicine. Her parents eventually agreed to medical school after she had secured a marital engagement (which fell through) and convinced her younger brother to enroll with her so that he could serve as her chaperone. 

The struggles with her parents and their expectations came at a cost, as Dolto suffered intense feelings of guilt about not fulfilling her feminine duties and disappointing her mother, particularly after the death of her older sister in 1920 left Dolto the sole female child in the family. In 1933, at her father’s behest, she started psychoanalysis with Rene Laforgue, under the auspices of coming to terms with her femininity and its limitations, and ultimately as a path to finally becoming a happy housewife. Bates quotes Dolto’s memoir where she describes how through the analysis with Laforgue she released herself from the grips of depression and guilt, “crying out all the tears in my body” and recognizing “my own neurosis was entirely founded on my mother’s…I had first and foremost to free myself from my mother” (p.67). Her analysis and analytic formation took place alongside her medical training, the cornerstones of her thought and clinical experience centered on Laforgue’s notion of family neurosis, névrose familiale, the idea that neuroses can be transmitted in families like viruses, and that the roots of children’s neuroses could be found in other family members, particularly mothers, who if unbalanced, were the main conduit for transmission. 

Laforgue was a founding member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, in which right-wing traditionalism prevailed, and psychoanalysis, which blossomed relatively late in France, was considered by many in the group a potential tool to correct deviations of sexuality. The French Catholic culture of the SPP aligned with much of the Vichy regime’s values during WWII. 

 Laforgue was later found to have had a complex wartime record, having both collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, possibly for professional gain, and assisted the Resistance.   So while during her formation Dolto encountered revolutionary ideas around education and the treatment of children as subjects to be reared with tenderness, curiosity, self-control, and honesty, and while she experienced a kind of liberation from her family’s own gendered neurosis, she also took up the mantle of conservative family values in psychoanalysis and was aligned during WWII with people and institutions that stood for the kinds of politics and culture that fell in line with fascism. The shape of her career, as for many women psychoanalysts of the era, was also delimited by her gender, with the analysis of children a question appropriate for women and of little interest to most men in the field. Dolto proceeded with gusto, determined to spread psychoanalytic ideas on childrearing to the public at the start of her career. She began launching advice columns as early as the 1940s, initially in publications tied to the Vichy regime that were attempts to influence French culture toward maintaining conservative family traditions. Dolto’s focus was psychoanalysis and its transmission, no matter the medium. The authority of the father, the importance of the mother being home for the children, the sanctity of marriage, and the place of religion and spirituality were some of the Catholic and conservative tenets that matched the values of the WWII era, but also ones that remained integral to Dolto’s thinking around healthy family structures throughout her career. In subsequent decades her political, social, and professional world expanded through her marriage to analyst Boris Dolto, her mentoring and close work with Maud Mannoni, and her affiliations with Lacan and the adjacent anti-psychiatry movements, situating her work more closely with radical movements of the 1960s and 70s that were resisting the medicalization of psychopathology. While her normative gender notions were unwavering, so was her bold use of psychoanalytic terms when addressing the lay public, not shying away from using its charged vocabulary of castration to relay the psychical stakes of subjective formation. Her late 1970s radio show, Lorsque l’enfant paraît (When the Child Arrives), invited listeners to write to her with their questions, giving them ample room to put words to their suffering and the suffering of their children and her ample room to respond with her characteristic intuition and precision, giving listeners an encounter with psychoanalysis as an everyday practice, worldview, and approach to not just family, but human relations at large. This was Dolto’s evergreen mission and it is brought to life vividly and deftly in the case of Dominique, a text that reads and responds to the intergenerational ills operating in a family and localized in one “backward” adolescent through Dolto’s psychoanalysis.

Like any of Freud’s case studies, Dolto’s case of Dominque is a snapshot of a treatment, of a way of working, of a certain clinical phenomenon, and of theory put into practice. And also like many of Freud’s case studies, its clinical value does not lend itself to the analysand himself in any lasting way. But as a clinical text, it illustrates a technique and approach with children using classical Freudian psychosexual theory in conjunction with the implicit working concept of névrose familiale, as well as Dolto’s own technique, which never involved directly playing, drawing, or modeling clay with the child, but instead, staying present as an observer and interlocutor with their unconscious. The setting is a public clinic, where a psychoanalytic student is present in each of the twelve sessions, transcribing the dialogue verbatim. Her mode of communication is direct, spontaneous, and alive. The reader is in the room following the exact speech as it unfolds, can look at accompanying images of Dominque’s drawings and clay models, and later is made privy to Dolto’s rich and associative post-session notes that propel the case forward and place the elements that shape her spoken interpretations. Later she expands these formulations into more cohesive conceptualizations of the case, of structural and clinical questions around neurosis and psychosis, and around Freudian theory, all of which say much in the abstract about her thinking and work, but provoke the question of what effects does all of this thinking and theorizing have on the treatment itself and where, if at all, can these effects be observed? An answer resides in Dominique’s speech itself—but before looking more closely at its evolution from a disorganized, subjectless place to one where a position in relation to the treatment, and in turn his family, is found—it is important to become acquainted with the very many details that Dolto attends to about Dominique and the Bel family.

Dominique arrives at the clinic at the age of fourteen. He is sent for his stereotyped behavior, his learning disability, and a concern that since going through puberty he is fated to become schizophrenic. Dolto notes his awkward stance, “high, bi-tonal and ‘sugary’” sounding voice, and in one of many comparisons to non-human animals, states that “he walks behind his mother, his arms bent, hands dropping much in the manner of circus dogs who have been trained to on their hind legs”; he is incapable of performing everyday tasks and “is totally disoriented in time and space” (Dolto, 2025, p. 15). He can read, but understands no math, does not understand how money works, has no friends at school, and rambles incoherent stories as a pastime. He is known to wrap himself in sheets and pretend to be a ghost in hallway of his home. After one session Dolto believes this is a case of psychosis and that the primary concern is Dominique’s social prospects, which she believes treatment can improve. 

The intersecting lines of the family neurosis are key for how Dolto conceptualizes this case. She draws on the parents’ and grandparents’ family histories, attending to details of the social, political, and cultural context of each family, as well as the family compositions, including number of children, birth orders, major life events, and traumas. She learns that Dominique is the second of three children, with an older brother, Paul-Marie, who is two and half years older, and a sister, Sylvie, who is almost three years younger than him. Dominique’s mother is a homemaker and his father, who has traveled a great deal throughout the children’s’ lives, an engineer. Over the course of the twelve sessions, Dolto interviews Dominque’s mother, Mrs. Bel, father, Mr. Bel, and brother, Paul-Marie. She hears of the mother’s background growing up in colonial Congo as an only child, a disappointment to her parents for being born a girl. Mrs. Bel’s mother is described by Mr. Bel as having a rough, peasant quality, and as being superstitious. He explains, “she believes in cutting off a marmot’s paw and tying it as an amulet around babies’ necks, and she’s done all kinds of things like that for my children” (p. 37). Mr. Bel is respected by his in-laws, including Mrs. Bel’s father, who she says has never sided with her in disagreements with her mother or her husband. Mrs. Bel speaks fondly of the all-girls Catholic boarding school she attended, noting that if she hadn’t gotten married, she would have been content being a nun in “Black Africa” (p.28). The shunning by her parents and her development within the Catholic school are elements that Dolto points to as shaping what she views as Mrs. Bel’s arrested psychosexuality. Dolto learns that Dominique is considered to look most like his mother, who is “darker and hairier” than the Bel family, who are considered far more belle than hers. Mrs. Bel was unwanted as a girl, but in Mr. Bel’s family, his own sister was the first girl in the family in 150 years and celebrated by all. Dominque’s sister, Sylvie, was received with similar enthusiasm and joy and is said to look like the Bels, making her a prize for both parents. Mr. Bel tells Dolto that when Dominique was born he was covered in fuzz and “looked like a monkey,” laughingly explaining that Mrs. Bel found Dominque so ugly at birth that he had to cheer her up (p. 37). Colonial consciousness of race permeates the language used by all throughout the case, and it is Dominique who bears the marks of othering linked to this violent history.

When it comes to Mr. Bel, Dolto learns of the tragic deaths of two of the father’s siblings, one when the father was five years old and his younger brother was one and a half years old. Mr. Bel was playing with a toy train that his toddler brother picked up and swallowed. The little brother died on the operating table a few days later, and the memory of this scene haunts Mr. Bel, as does the image of the baby’s empty cot. Dolto writes, 

It is the same cot which later Georges Bel did not want to leave unoccupied from one child to the next. Paul-Marie left the cot only to give over to Dominque. An empty cot in the parent’s bedroom would have upset the father. Dominique took Paul-Marie’s place in the cot without any delay, and Sylvie took Dominque’s when he left home to stay with his paternal grandmother. The Bels did not buy Dominque a new bed in preparation for this third birth. (pp. 26-27)

Mr. Bel had another brother, twelve years his junior, who presumably died at the age of seventeen after disappearing in the Pyrenees during a hiking trip, the same year of Dominique’s birth—the Bel family spent years searching for him but to no avail. Finally, Mr. Bel’s sister lost an infant during a visit when Dominque was eight years old. Dominque’s grandmother took him to see his dead cousin and explained that he would be buried “and transformed into earth.” These are the ghosts of the Bel family and it is Dominique who inexplicably, for the Bels, haunts the halls of their home, pretending to be a ghost.

For Dolto it is the ill-defined and replaceable place Dominque holds in his family that contributes to his symptoms. The threads of his family story that she picks up have to do with the father’s unmetabolized losses of his own siblings, both in childhood and at the time of Dominque’s birth, in conjunction with Mrs. Bel’s own arrested psychosexuality and how it plays out during the Mr. Bel’s frequent and sometimes prolonged absences, where she uses her children as substitutes for the intimacy she misses, and as far as Dolto sees it, has missed her whole life. At this parental impasse of mourning and infantile arrested psychosexuality, Dominque suffers the most of his three siblings.  His parents consider him consitutionally fierce, and Mrs. Bel finds it nearly impossible to maintain separation and limits with him in particular. Dolto learns that at the time of his sister’s birth, Dominique, who had been enrolled in preschool, was sent to live with his paternal grandparents. He thrived there, but upon his return, found that his sister had taken his place in his crib and that he had to sleep elsewhere. He began to regress at this point, but most dramatically surrounding his demand that he be breastfed again like the baby. Mrs. Bel complied, allowing him to return to the breast. Dominique subsequently went mute and was kicked out of preschool for encopresis. 

The course of Dominique’s education and development are erratic from there, with pockets of progress that occur with separation of the family when he stays with the grandparents (at the age of eight he spends a summer away and learns to read, but then loses the skill for a period of time upon returning home), but with an ever worsening drift toward a boy with no place. An exchange in the first session, before Dolto has clarity on the specific interplay of these elements, illustrates how clearly she recognizes the impact of unknown histories on Dominque’s experience:

DOMINIQUE: “Well, me I’m not like everybody else. Sometimes when I wake up, I think I’ve lived through a true story.” (These are his first words to me literally transcribed.)

I SAY TO HIM: Which made you untrue.

DOMINIQUE: That’s it! But how do you know?

ME: I don’t really know. That’s what I think when I see you.  (p. 30)

From then on, the reader’s compass in the dizzying details of Dominique’s twelve sessions is Dolto’s adherence to the logic of successive psychosexual castrations—oral, anal, phallic, and what she can begin to structure, but not quite realize with him of the oedipal. Dominique’s disorganized speech and mystifying behaviors are posited as signs of failure at these junctures of castration, a fundamental and general concept that Dolto’s theoretical work in The Unconscious Body Image links with the word, “symbologenic” or symbol producing. For Dolto, symbologenic castrations have the potential to, as she says, “bear fruit” when caregivers offer a passage through speech that points to a future, and where through the inevitable separations and losses of objects, something in the symbolic field is attained. The caregivers mark a law, an interdiction, and for Dolto, it is important that the caregivers demonstrate that they also are restricted by it. The initial goal of the drive is forbidden, a part of the object lost, and the new means for attaining satisfaction are potential sublimations, products of the symbologenic at work. In the case of Dominique, what we see is symbologenic castration that does not result in sublimation, but instead, Dolto says, perversion and mutilation at many psychical levels, a result of caregivers who lived according to laws that are not for all. 

Dolto’s interpretations serve to introduce and establish these castrations, and follow an expected and strict hegemonic, heterosexual logic. She appeals to the law, asserting the place of incest taboo and marking its violations and dehumanizing effects. The frequent comparisons between Dominque and an animal are put to rest in the ninth session, when she makes a pointed statement to Dominque while observing a clay dog he has constructed:

One wants to be grown-up, have all the privileges of the grown-up, of men, of one’s father. But one doesn’t quite have the body of a grown-up. Well, you see this isn’t a person, it’s a dog. Maybe there’s something in your heart that would rather not become a grown-up, that would prefer to remain a nice half of an animal, lying on the ground like a dog in its kennel. It’s as if the earth had taken half of its body. An animal doesn’t talk, and sometimes when you speak you don’t say what you think. It would be easier not to speak. The dog sees everything. He has eyes, nostrils, ears, a mouth that is very well made and enormous. He hears everything, smells everything, but he doesn’t say so. And also he can’t act since he isn’t all there. You too have ideas and you keep what you think to yourself. We’ll go on working next time so we can better understand what there is in your heart that looks like your model, which is both large and small at the same time, which feels and bears, which has a head and a tail that is large, but doesn’t know how to say it, and just doesn’t move. (pp. 115-116)

For Dolto, a symbologenic castration that is generative is humanizing and occurs through speech. It proffers an ever-widening set of possibilities for the subject to find a place within the social world. Dominque is left unspoken to, used, returned to breastfed, regressed, and confused for dead. Dolto remarks, “Remember that Dominique learned to speak before he was weaned; that he weaned himself, and that then later, he was again allowed to breast-feed as often and as much as he liked, as long as his young sister was still being breast-fed” (p. 69). And it is this emblematic failure at oral castration that in part subverts the trajectory of his psychical structuring, rendering him an undifferentiated oral, anal, and phallic part-object in the dyad with his mother, that at times feels more animal than human. During her conversation with Dominique’s brother, Paul-Marie, in the fifth session, Dolto learns of how Mrs. Bel holds Dominique and the family constellation frozen with her demands that Dominque or his sister sleep with her during the father’s many absences. Dolto sees Dominique immediately after speaking with Paul-Marie, and addresses the situation directly:

But it is you who are quite right, and your father would agree with you. Your mother never had a brother; she’s always been brought up in a convent with nuns. She doesn’t know that when a little boy sleeps in his mother’s bed and when he is up against her night gown and that he doesn’t have very much on, it does something to him. In his heart, he feels it’s very bad for him to take himself for his mother’s husband, because then he takes his daddy’s place and it does something to him in his body. He doesn’t know whether he is an animal or a little baby boy or a little baby girl and it makes him stupid, not to know what he is anymore. You see yourself, mother tells you that if daddy were there you wouldn’t go into her bed. Well, in the law of all men, everywhere in the world, even with the Blacks who live all naked, it is forbidden for a boy to sleep with his mother. The boy can never be the mother’s real husband. He can never love her to make real children. Real children are made with the sexual organs of their two parents. The law of men is that the boy’s sexual organ must never meet his mother’s. What I tell you is the truth. Your mother wants you to know the truth. It is because your mother has never had a brother and that she was brought up by the nuns (I repeat this) that she has never thought of it. But ask your father, he’ll tell you the same thing that I’m telling you. It is the law of all men. (p.88)

Dolto’s intervention is an attempt to establish a place for Dominique that is distinct from that of his mother’s object and from the “foreclosure of the oedipal self” (p. 90). She calls on the authority of the father and his word when making this assertion, and when the session ends, she also speaks to Mrs. Bel, telling her that the behavior is not appropriate and a source of turmoil for her boys. She describes how Mrs. Bel “answers with the sharp crafty air of a little girl who’s been caught in the act” (p.90). Dolto’s interpretation moves as a series of analytic acts—she seizes the moment and attends to it with conviction, any unwieldiness in her spontaneous words proving less significant than the message that comes through with clarity for all parties. 

The effects of Dolto’s analytic actions are most clearly tracked in the evolution of Dominque’s muddled speech and cryptic behaviors, which begin to organize and become directed from session to session. From a soup of bizarre details and behaviors, many of which Dolto marks but does not return to, the reader can observe the shift in Dominque as a change in gestalt. In this re-reading of the new translation, I was struck by how clearly Dolto’s interpretations had a bearing on the evolution of a specific symptomatic behavior that transformed within Dominque’s play and, in turn, took a symbolic place in his speech.

It begins when Dominique’s mother tells Dolto in the first session that Dominique also has tics, that he repeats the same actions (which actions?), meaninglessly—or, rather, that he has obsessional habits, does odd things. Certain objects must not be moved; dirty underwear must be put back in the drawer, as it is, without being washed. He hates to have his socks and underwear put in the laundry. He doesn’t mind changing them, but he would like his dirty underwear to be put away in the drawer directly so it can be put on again, as it is, the following week. (p. 20)

In session three, Dolto links his dirty underwear peculiarity to what is coming through in Dominque’s narration of his modeling of clay and drawing, and his struggles to locate sexual difference. Dominque says, 

What strikes me was when I turned to look at my little chest of drawers, I’d put the soldiers of the Middle Ages there. The kind of people you wouldn’t like to meet in the street. I put them in the chest of drawers. And then I was afraid at night. And I wouldn’t go to bed before the end because I want to see her again. It’s me that she’s going to do things to. (p. 48)

Here it is challenging to follow his condensed speech, but Dolto is in the room with the unconscious and afterward makes the following associations:

He is saying something about sexuality—though completely foreclosed—that relates to Babette, alias his sister: the story of the snake associated with Babette’s rolled-up pigtails; with the rats that drive off the dangerous soldiers hidden in the chest of drawers or cabinet; with the motor impulses hidden in the trees; with sexual impulses which are punished by the tempters (myself in this case). (p.53)

She continues in a footnote, “It will be remembered that a chest of drawers or cabinet can represent the abdomen and that Dominique wants his underwear to be put away in the chest of drawers without having been washed” (p.53). The circuit of Dominique’s drives is held in the abdomen chest of drawers, a place where his struggle with mastery over his bowels and the intrusive urges that come from both himself and others are illegible forces of sexual difference at war with his very existence. 

Much later, in the eleventh session, after her dog/human and incest taboo interpretations, the thread of dressers and abdomens unspools. Over the course of the eight sessions in between, Dominique’s speech has cohered and along with it, his studies in school, his relationships with his peers, and within his family. His confusion around species, gender, and pronouns has resolved, as has the condensation at play in his muddled speech that initially was delivered in strange tones. Dominique says to Dolto in this penultimate session,

“I went to the Salvador Dali exhibition; you know him?”

ME: Tell me what you think of him.

DOMINIQUE: Well, he’s a well-known painter. I quite liked it, but I noticed that everywhere there were holes and there were drawers in people, holes and drawers. They say he’s a very original painter.

ME: What do you think?

DOMINIQUE: I like what he does, but not those holes and the spots he makes on purpose. He has good ideas, but not drawers… (p.145)

Dominique doesn’t like the holes or the drawers. Ghostly images of castrated emptiness, loss, and fragmentation? Perhaps. In Seminar VII, Lacan famously describes the match boxes his friend Jacques Prevert had collected and arranged in a “continuous ribbon” that ran along the walls of his living room (Lacan, 1997, p.114). The match boxes in this arrangement had been elevated from an everyday object to something with a certain “thingness” through a sublimatory act in which each box is pushed out into the open space of the next, resulting in one inside the other in a way Lacan finds “extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view”. He remarks that: 

the match box appears to be a mutant form of something that has so much importance for us that it can occasionally take on a moral meaning; it is what we call a drawer. In this case, the drawer was liberated and no longer fixed in the rounded fullness of a chest, thus presenting itself with a copulatory force… (p.114) 

The simple arrangement of these slightly askew drawers brings us to the place of copulation, of the abdomen, of an open space exposed, revealing all that it can hold in secret and the object nothing that connects it to the primordial Thing. Dolto does not connect Dominique’s reflection on Dali’s drawers in her own theoretical associations with the abdomen drawers of before, but Dominique’s play and narrative in this session flesh out and move what was stuck in the dirty underwear chest of drawers that holds a mess of family objects he wishes to expel. As he speaks and plays, he plans for the future, unknowingly clarifies enigmas of past sessions, and constructs the body of a sick man through clay, who must be operated on to be cured. Perhaps by association to the father’s toddler brother, Dolto reminds us that Dominique’s father forever believes Dominique is an idiot whose only hope is an operation on the part of the brain that executes mathematic functions. The sick clay man Dominque is sculpting swallows and eats too much, as Dominique fills his middle with strange objects. “At a certain point,” Dolto describes, “Dominique bursts out laughing and says: ‘But where does he put everything he swallows? There’s nothing there. He needs a stomach. I’d forgotten to put in the stomach. There. It’s okay now’” (Dolto, 2025, p. 147). Little by little as he operates, he removes the problematic parts of the man’s mid-section, and Dolto notes how “he enjoys his sadistic fantasy” (p.148). By the end, after he has sewn the patient back up, he realizes he’s forgotten something the man swallowed, an umbrella—he retrieves it and the clay man dies. A joke about poop is made. “Look he’s died of it, good riddance,” he ends (p.149). Dolto remarks how she: 

was struck by how extraordinarily clever Dominique was with his hands; how exact in his observation and in his modeling. He made well-proportioned anatomical parts and placed them accurately in his clay model. Independent of his performance in school, these gifts seem to testify to an exceptional manual adaptation. I also noted the free laugh, the natural facial expressions, the normally accented and modulated voice, free of nasalisation. (p.151)

It is in the development of his speech over the course of their work—from incoherent and odd to well-oriented and even erudite—that the structuring transformation of her work can be most readily observed. It is through this speech that narrates the operation scene that one hears a mind that is not mired in but instead alive with aggression and libido that come through vividly in his laughter. One can read in this final surgery scene a retelling of the loss of Mr. Bel’s toddler brother, who died on the operating table. But like the dresser abdomen, this too, is unmarked—an element like so many in any treatment, that are present and part of the working through, even if they are not remembered as pieces that have been ingested, digested, and put into exchange with the analyst. While many of Dolto’s interventions have to do with the placing of a paternal law between Dominique and the mother, whom she often describes in ungenerous terms, it is Mrs. Bel who is a motor of the treatment, listening to Dominique’s desire to continue and recognizing its effects. Actually, everyone in the family notices the changes in Dominique—his father describes him as “waking up” and Paul-Marie concedes that life is easier since he began working with Dolto. However, despite Mr. Bel’s recognition of change in his son, he forbids the treatment from continuing, just at the point that Dominque has a desire to continue and forge a more robust social link. It’s as if Mr. Bel himself cannot allow this abject place Dominque has held in the family to fall away. An initial interpretation Dolto makes about Dominique’s struggles around movement and change, the stakes of which she links to life and death, could be read as having more to do with Mr. Bel as he relates to Dominique than with Dominique’s own limitations. Dolto writes:

finding that familiar objects have been moved from their usual pales will overwhelm him with anxiety. He has a phobia about washing and laundering. Anything that moves or changes or is modified becomes a threat. Any dynamic image gives him away, gives him away as living, signals his existence as far as being still alive, and so apt to be cancelled out, killed (if he is still alive). (pp. 69-70)

Dominqiue’s unconscious logic comes through cryptically:  To move is to lose one’s place, which is equivalent to death. Through the work with Dolto, movement also becomes a chance to live.

Sadly, Dominique is held in place by the confluence of the parental desires that made him and continue to bind him. His father prohibits treatment from continuing another year, Mrs. Bel says she must obey, and Dolto accepts the news, but asks Dominique his thoughts. His parting words are hopeful: 

If I were to decide, I would come back. I’m sure it would help. But as Daddy says he doesn’t want to pay anymore…if I could come alone, well I would come every Friday and it would do me a lot of good. But too bad. Daddy wants it that way and, well, since Madame Dolto isn’t angry, I’ll wait until I’m older and make my own living, and then I’ll come back to become completely well, if I’m still shy. (pp. 158-160)

Scouring the English language internet for any post treatment developments proved futile, but asking French analysts about the case, I learned that Dominique’s life did not unfold well from there as he ultimately ended up institutionalized. Bates’ book proved the only English source I could find that offered biographical details about Dominique after the initial publication of the case. Bates writes:

By 1970, Dominique had finished school and become a potter, sporting hippy clothes and long hair. Madame Bel, by now separated from Georges, had contacted Dolto again, concerned that Dominique was being sexually exploited by some co-workers. Dolto responded by helping to arrange a placement with a specialist social worker in the south of France. Later, Dominique worked for a time in Belgium, but rather than settle there was eventually persuaded to return home by his mother, who—according to Dolto—thereupon turned him into a ‘native laundry houseboy’ (boy à faire la lessive). This label referenced Madame Bel’s colonial upbringing—with a pejorative racial stereotype—while also appearing to vindicate Dolto’s original interpretation of the case: i.e. that Dominique was being prevented from developing his independence by a tyrannical mother. Madame Bel would presumably tell a different story. When Le Cas Dominique was published, she threatened to sue Dolto for defamation, but was talked out of it by her son’s social worker. Dolto subsequently—out of guilt, her biographer suggests—donated part of the book’s royalties towards funding Dominique’s professional training. Having thus been spared a possible scandal, Dolto was free to continue her rise to national celebrity. (Bates, 2022, p.176)

Bates writes about Dolto with great attention and depth, but also with great critique. His examination of her career reaches to connect the recent controversies around psychoanalysis and autism in France, depicting the conflict between the advancement and recognition of pathologies that could be served with more tools and skills than the “mother-blaming” of which he accuses Dolto and psychoanalysis as a whole. This is the timeless charge against psychoanalysis and against those who take its vocabulary, its interventions, and its limitations, and hold them as literal, all-knowing, and normativizing. While Dolto’s own personal attachment to the theory she espouses and employs can be cast in this light, in the actual encounter of her work, there is something far more generative, open, and alive with what remains revolutionary about psychoanalysis. 

Lacan’s interventions and inventions in the theory are a relief for those looking to work and think in ways that transcend traditional heteronormative values and fixed ideas about gender. While Dolto’s writing does not liberate the most reviled elements of analytic theory, her clinical work forges paths for the individual subject to liberate himself much in the way Dolto did through her own analysis. She and Lacan were contemporaries and colleagues. For Lacan, Dolto was the kind of practitioner with the know-how to act as an analyst in the ways he was expounding in his seminars. She uses the theory she talks about so literally to make a place for the polymorphous presentations she encounters—the discussion beyond these interventions about her politics, religiosity, and ideals are of consequence, but they are not what keeps her work alive. 

Over the years in my own formation with Lacanian supervisors, I have wondered about the reach of questions about each of the parents and sets of grandparents of an analysand, of the queries into what is known of family history, of lineage, of immigration, of birth orders, and significant life events. Often I wondered how these supervisors arrived at the specificity of their questions that came to shape a distinct technique, especially in the preliminary sessions. Mapping these details carefully and gingerly through the course of a treatment has become an orientation in my own work, and it wasn’t until I began to read Dolto and encounter how she approached her patients that I understood the unspoken influence of the formative notion of family neurosis. Unbeknownst to me, I was positioning myself in Dolto’s legacy, but via Lacanians who did not use these ideas prescriptively when it came to gender or family structures. 

An anecdote told by a psychoanalytic candidate demonstrates something of how Dolto also took these elements and developed them as interventions that exceed the confines of gender and heteronormative relationships. The candidate was in France to learn more about one of Dolto’s most lasting and impactful interventions, La Maison Verte. The center, which is a free space for children under four and their caregivers, has a number of psychoanalysts and greeters present to facilitate and evoke the space’s few rules, including the most symbolic and interesting: a painted line that runs across the open room that children are not allowed to cross. A father brought his child, a small boy under two years old, to one of the centers in Paris repeatedly over the course of a few days. The father was often distracted, in the corner, sometimes on his phone, while his son explored the space. The boy became interested in the line and began riding a tricycle to its edge, testing the boundary, and even crossing it. The greeters reminded him of the rule, but after the behavior continued during their visits, one of the psychoanalysts struck up a conversation with the father. He shared that the week before his wife had to fly to their home country suddenly after the death of a relative. This was the first separation the child had experienced from his mother. No one in the family had had the idea to speak to the child about where his mother had gone. And so this is the conversation that took place between the father and the child and the analyst. The child listened attentively as he was addressed directly about where his mother had gone and when she would be back. The painted line, a seemingly arbitrary and in Dolto’s words, castrating limit, provoked a behavior that in this context was recognized as a call to speak. To speak with a child about the truths of his humanity and family often remains a forgotten and stunningly simple possibility, but one that has the most powerful potential for impacting how a subject moves through a life.

In reading the first session Dolto holds with Dominique, I paused, and as I did throughout the course of reading through the subsequent sessions, wondered how would behaviors such as the stuffing of dirty underwear into a drawer be registered in the standard mental health facilities available to the average school aged child today? What diagnoses would be doled out, what medications prescribed, what behavioral directions would ensue, what kind of “training” would Dominique be “gently” forced to follow? 

One can speculate on how Dominque would be treated today, but the record we have is a testament to Dolto’s sturdy psychoanalytic position and pointed interpretations that serve not to direct or inhibit, but to establish the law and introduce him to a world beyond his familial relations. Her listening and thinking move fluidly from the intimacy of his singular body (a construction that is both psychical and physical) to the body of the collective, as she traces the network of signifiers and dynamics that move through, between, around, outside, inside. The limited, but significant effects of the treatment can be linked to her adherence to this logic of symbologenic castrations, but in and of itself this is not enough. 

Dolto ties these intimate elements to the transmission of prejudices, modes of care, and perverse and dehumanizing systems of gender, class, war, religion, and colonialism (to name a few that mark Dominique) that construct and destroy bodies in singular fashion, one by one. Dolto took on the case of Dominique in its specificity, with an ethic that informed her pointed and effective interpretations, and it is this ethical position and theoretical clarity that is the basis of strong psychoanalytic work—work that offers an essential place for the odd, the strange, the abnormal, and the pathological to be recognized in their subjective potential for transformation.