Search results
cultural landscape. Her numerous books were widely read and studied. Her daily fifteen-minute broadcast on the France Inter radio station was a source of ‘hope and love’ for thousands of listeners. 2 Dolto appeared all over the media, commenting on a wide range of issues connected to psychology, parenting, education, gender, sexuality, family, bioethics and children’s literature, culture and rights. She was seen as a French national treasure. Across France, hundreds of public institutions were named in her honour, from schools
their families. Her emphasis on treating children with the same respect as adults, and on taking care to explain important events to them in terms that they can make sense of, are rightly celebrated. Separating these valuable aspects of her work from her time-bound prejudices on gender roles, fusional mothers, race and homosexuality is, however, not straightforward. There are no simple dividing lines that can be drawn – yet it is necessary to delineate them if Dolto is to be retained in today’s literature of child
could be influenced towards either heterosexuality or homosexuality by their social environment, and if the former was preferable (as Dolto certainly believed), then it followed that the environment should be watched for influences that might encourage an undesirable outcome. In 1972, Dolto launched an attack on the Franco-American children’s publishing company Harlin Quist, in an interview in L’Express under the headline ‘Littérature enfantine, attention danger’ (‘Children’s literature: danger signs’). She objected in
validity of lay (i.e. non-medical) analysis, and the applicability of psychoanalytic concepts in domains beyond medicine. Marie Bonaparte, who was not a doctor, led the arguments in favour of lay analysis and of applying Freud’s thought to such fields as criminology, literature and anthropology. When in 1927 the SPP created the RFP , with the aim of targeting a broader audience than EP , several EP members objected to Bonaparte’s proposal to feature Freud’s name on its cover. 36 Bonaparte, who was part-funding the venture
‘against nature’, such as masturbation, homosexuality or fetishism, could no longer be considered mortal sins. 106 These works were the psychoanalytic end of a broader Catholic sexology literature, of which the most successful was Paul Chanson’s Art d’aimer et la continence conjugale ( Art of Love and Conjugal Continence , 1950). 107 The Kinsey reports, whose impact in France should not be underestimated, provided a backdrop to this, by underlining the hitherto unsuspected rarity of full sexual ‘continence’. 108
, aged twenty-two, she had spent two weeks in Provence, staying at the country residence of the Marettes’ family friends, the Delebecque family. The Delebecques had connections at the highest levels of Action Française – during Dolto’s stay with them, Léon Daudet came to lunch and Charles Maurras sent flowers. 101 They had two daughters close in age to Françoise, and a son, Édouard, two years her junior. The children shared interests in music, literature and art. One daughter, Christiane, was about to begin a degree
of the most common was lues venera , or plague of Venus – an appellation which suggests not simply an illness associated with sexual intercourse, but one linked with the female deity who embodied erotic love. The implication was clear: it was a disease born of Venus and borne within the bodies of women. In popular literature, and even in some medical tracts, the bodies
The most famous play in English literature centres on the poisoning of Hamlet’s father. It is only one of many examples of poisoning in plays of the period; there are male poisoners and female poisoners, innocent victims and guilty ones, foreign ones and home-bred ones. This is not surprising given that poisoning was easy to stage and to act, but it also allows plays to explore a number of important contemporary issues. The death of Hamlet’s father occurs in a garden, specifically in an orchard. This is one of a number of sinister uses of fruit and flowers in the plays of Shakespeare and of other early modern playwrights, partly as a consequence of the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries and partly as a result of the many new plants being brought into English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. There were also fears about venom, about venereal infection, and about the ways in which soporifics troubled the distinction between sleep and death. The death of Hamlet’s father is also one of several examples of the ear being particularly vulnerable to poison, an idea explored here through plays featuring informers; finally, as Hamlet painfully discovers, poisoning is remarkably difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and the relationship of humans to the environment.
, solve the problem of patient supervision, as well as facilitate the construction of lighter, airier asylums. For these reasons, Bentham’s panopticon ( 1791 ) has been cited in secondary literature on the architecture of lunatic asylums as a primary influence in late Georgian design (Markus 1982 , 1993 ; Smith 1999 ). From an architectural perspective, asylums have been described as analogous with other contemporaneous institutions for confinement, like workhouses and prisons; Bentham thought that his panoptic design could be applied to any
feature in narratives of sanitary improvement. 14 City slaughterhouses have a wide literature of their own. 15 Emphasising animals in the city in this narrative of Dublin provides a new perspective on familiar aspects of urban change including public health, transportation, policing and associational culture. This book reveals a Dublin integrated into the agricultural ebbs and flows of Ireland rather than insulated from them and a city where class, religion and politics affected attitudes towards pigs and cattle and dogs. Efforts to control, regulate and conceal the