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In Psychoanalysis and the family, Richard Bates reveals the striking range and extent of the influence of Françoise Dolto (1908–88) – child psychoanalyst and France’s leading authority on parenting and family dynamics from the 1970s onwards.
Against the backdrop of rapid economic, social and cultural change, Dolto emerged as a new, reassuring, national presence. Seen as a national treasure, her views proved influential on a wide range of issues linked to psychology, parenting, education, gender, sexuality, bioethics and children’s culture and rights. Dolto claimed the mantle of a progressive, innovative expert who swept away outdated concepts – but Bates demonstrates that her ideas in fact had deep roots in right-wing, anti-feminist currents. Dolto used her media platforms and the cultural authority of psychoanalysis to ensure that her psychoanalytic vision affected the whole French nation and was implanted in a variety of institutional settings. Bates shows how her vision had lasting repercussions, in areas ranging from the treatment of autism to the organisation of children’s centres.
In demonstrating Dolto’s importance, this highly original, thoroughly researched book makes an essential contribution to historical understanding of twentieth-century French society. It forces a reassessment of the place of psychoanalysis in French social history, showing that its true significance lay well beyond the academic seminar or the consulting room.
, CA: University of California Press, 2011), for an example of how living conditions and gender relations shaped lives in 1930s Paris. 50 Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 5. Zaretsky’s emphasis. 51 Sigmund Freud, ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908), in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 9
history of psychoanalysis, but also through that of family politics. It was not just that Dolto’s public profile accorded her the opportunity to contribute to shaping family policy – as she did in the 1980s when taking part in government-commissioned study groups on issues of divorce, child custody and bioethics – but that her advice to the public on child-rearing questions emerged from decades of intense discourse and debate around gender, sexuality and the role of women in society. The history of these questions has been a
12 Magazine Project ( 2006 ). ——, ‘The body’s contagious memory: Lygia Clark’s return to the museum’ , Transversal ( 2007 ). ——, ‘A shift towards the unnameable’ , in G. Brett (ed.), Cildo Meireles ( London : Tate Publishing , 2008 ), pp. 132–7 . Roudinesco , E. Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis
the immediate post-war period? How did the Cold War thwart her progressive stance on the rights of African-Americans to enter into areas of medical practice such as psychiatry? ‘Mental hygiene’ and minority groups In his comprehensive history of psychoanalysis in America, Nathan Hale has described 1945–65 as the period of the rapid rise of psychoanalytic psychiatry. In the American context, psychoanalysis – the practice based in Freudian principles and theories – emerged from the ashes and traumas of the First World War. The traditional methods of psychiatry, which
audience that ‘[m]y name is Silena, I care not who know it, so I do not’. 44 From its earliest years, London commercial theatre subjected subjectivity to rhetorical and dramaturgical exploration. Because Shakespeare took part in that process, and later became an important part of the history of psychoanalysis, we are still haunted by that exploration
between science and arts, and so it provided a bridging link between the two fields of psychiatry and literature. In the history of psychoanalysis, the years 1906–14 engendered what Frank J. Sulloway has called, by way of criticism, a literary style of reasoning.24 While psychoanalytic case studies decisively differed from their psychiatric counterparts, the scientific self-image of psychoanalysis is undeniable. John Forrester, in his pioneering article ‘Thinking in cases’, best describes how psychoanalysis created ‘a new way of telling a life in the twentieth century
infrastructure in Nigeria was therefore local, national and international. This chapter builds upon recent research in the history of psychiatry that has already begun complicating the use of binary constructions and the notion that international science tends to serve ‘external’ masters in colonial spaces. For example, recent comparative work in the history of psychoanalysis has shown how the construction of a universal self has had significant global impact, but in diverse ways depending on the local context in which it has been employed. Psychoanalytic
agent of treachery in the lives of many individuals.6 Such a critique, of course, does not need to be mounted from without: Freudianism itself was riven from the outset. Given its scope and complexity, it would be a surprise were it not so. It’s a commonplace to regard Freud himself as a sort of father-figure against whom various key figures from the history of psychoanalysis – Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, perhaps even Anna Freud – rebelled as they would against any authority figure towards whom they experienced feelings of affection and submission on the
without telepathy. Tele-pathy is irreducibly about the ‘pathos’ (mind or feeling, suffering), as well as about the enigmas and paradoxes of what is or seems ‘tele-’ (distant, at a distance). Telepathy is, among other things, a question of the Channel. As Derrida remarks in ‘Telepathy’ (1981), a fragment that forms a bizarre supplement to his ‘Envois’ in The Post Card , and focuses on Freud’s surprisingly numerous writings about telepathy and on the place of telepathy in the history of psychoanalysis: ‘our entire story of Freud also writes itself in English, it