Francoise Dolto, the French Child Psychoanalyst Emerging from the Shadows

ABSTRACT

This text attempts to underscore the significant role of Francoise Dolto, the French child psychoanalyst, working with traumatized children during and after World War II. Being mostly known as a friend and colleague of Jacques Lacan, her own original clinical work was often overshadowed by the more prominent psychoanalysts on the French scene. Francoise Dolto could be considered as working in a relational mode, but more importantly, she truly put the concept of the symbolic to work, speaking to infants from the beginnings of their lives in an adult language, always invoking and including the instance of the law and the Third in her analytic work.

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Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein

Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, living and working in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the The Wiener Arbietskreis für Psychoanalyse where she is also serves as the vice-president on the Board. She is the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum where she had been the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 2008. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is on the faculty at PINC and on the visiting faculty at the NYUPostdoctoral Program, New York and at the The Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP) She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film as well as between the different schools of psychoanalysis. Her most recent publications include, The space of transition between Winnicott and Lacan in Between Winnicott and Lacan, (2011) Jacques Lacan in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2012, which is being republished in 2023) Living between two languages: A Bi-focal Perspective, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis, (2016) Routledge, Dora, the unending and unraveling story, in Dora, Hysteria & Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study, Leuven University Press, (2018), Unexpected antecedents to the concept of the death drive: a return to the beginnings, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive, in Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture and Active Witnessing in psychoanalytic practice in Psyche, (2023)Her book on Edouard Manet, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past, is in preparation.