Françoise Dolto Between Relational Thinking and Freudian Metapsychology

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present the work of the French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) and to explore possible contributions to current debates in relational psychoanalysis. We present the historical and conceptual relationship between relational psychoanalysis and French psychoanalysis. Within this context, we will discuss certain key concepts (e.g., unconscious body image, need and desire, symbolic castrations) of Dolto who, in our view, provides an intersubjective understanding of the unconscious that resembles current relational approaches such as Jessica Benjamin’s theory of recognition. We shall discuss Dolto’s embodied understanding of the unconscious and the role of language and intercorporeal resonance and will compare it to Benjamin’s relational approach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Moreover, her affirmation of her Catholic faith (Dolto, 1979) and the heteronormativity of her clinical examples appear to not be well suited to current debates concerning the enlargement of Freudian metapsychology to include non-traditional family structures. To counter this critique, we propose to focus on Dolto’s concepts such as the importance of desire for the freedom of the other, which is in fact perfectly compatible with these debates.

² The central contributions to a systematic comparison of their work are Bacon (2002), Guillerault (2007) and Morgan (2013):

³ See for example the first pages of her lecture to the French Society of Philosophy, “Au jeu du désir, les dés sont pipés et les cartes truquées” [In the game of desire, the dice are loaded and the cards are rigged] (Dolto, 1985, p. 268); or speaking about the primary mother-child relation in The Unconscious Body-Image, she writes that the child’s body is unified by the introjection of the mother’s desire (Dolto, 1984/2023, 70/50).

⁴ The first number in the reference refers to the original French edition, and the second to the new English translation by Sharmini Bailly.

⁵ A sound critique of a dualistic position concerning the body image and the bodily schema can be found in Saint-Aubert (2013), as well as a discussion of Dolto’s positions in relation to Merleau-Ponty.

⁶ In general, the mirror stage for Dolto doesn’t have the same importance as for Lacan or, in a different sense, for Winnicott (Boukobza, 2009, p. 96).

⁷ Here we find the first of many parallels in the thinking of Dolto and Winnicott who also insists on the necessity of good enough care to develop a sense of a “continuity of being” (Winnicott, 1960/2016).

⁸ The term “castration” is directly taken from the Freudian corpus. It must be understood as an extension and transformation of sexuality, i.e., as a metaphor for the impediment of immediate satisfaction.

⁹ Interestingly, Dolto insists here, contrary to an orthodox Freudian position, on the separating aspect of the mother rather than on the dyadic characterization of the relationship between baby and mother. This is in line with current feminist approaches that emphasize the subject-subject relationship between the former dyadic couple (Benjamin, 1988)

¹⁰ The Freudian vocabulary that Dolto is using here can be misleading. The term “representation” suggests a conscious mental content, which is in contradiction to its being unconscious. Therefore, we reformulate it in terms of “something in the world,” a more vague and therefore rigorous way of expressing the issue.

¹¹ Accordingly, Dolto was perceived as a political psychoanalyst, a “psychanalyste dans la cite,” for example through her well-known radio programs on France Inter in the 1980s.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung [10.17.2.031PH].

Notes on contributors

Lukas Iwer-Docter

Lukas Iwer-Docter, M.A., M.Sc. is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist working at a counseling center for addiction in Frankfurt/Main (Germany). In his PhD project he works on the role of intersubjective recognition in the development and treatment of psychotic disorders at the Heidelberg clinic of General Psychiatry, Section Phenomenology. His clinical expertise lies in psychodynamic therapy and community psychiatry, his research focus is on phenomenology and critical theory. He has published articles on the account of Judith Butler (2020) and Axel Honneth (2022) on recognition and their relevance for social psychiatry.

Together with Stefan Kristensen he worked on the research project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, “The Intercorporeal Unconscious – Resonance and Embodiment in the psychoanalytic tradition.”

Stefan Kristensen

Stefan Kristensen, Ph.D. is a philosopher, professor of aesthetics and art theory at the University of Strasbourg (France), Dean of the Faculty of arts (Faculté des arts). He works on issues around corporeality and subjectivity, image theory, and the body in psychoanalysis. He is the author of three books, Parole et subjectivité. Merleau-Ponty et la phénoménologie de l’expression (2010), Jean-Luc Godard philosophe (2014), and La machine sensible (2017). His next project, with the title The Intercorpreal Unconscious, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024. Together with Lukas Iwer-Docter he worked on the research project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, “The Intercorporeal Unconscious – Resonance and Embodiment in the psychoanalytic tradition.”