Psychoanalysis and the Family in Twentieth-Century France: Françoise Dolto and Her Legacy by Richard Bates (review)

Abstract

Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) was a French psychoanalyst specializing in children and parenting who, as Richard Bates makes clear in this thorough and important account of her life, work, and influence, was also a ‘cultural phenomenon’ (p. 17). Contrasting Dolto’s place in French culture with that of Jacques Lacan, Bates argues that while the latter’s impact was restricted to theory and he addressed the ‘avant-garde elite’, Dolto’s work was directed towards the ‘everyday experience of ordinary French people’ (p. 8). Accordingly, Bates approaches Dolto through the lens of a cultural historian and situates his work alongside other (relatively rare) historical accounts of psychoanalysis as a social and cultural phenomenon. This wide-angle approach enables Bates to demonstrate the ways in which, in contrast to the left-oriented theoretical thrust of Lacan’s work, Dolto was a ‘thoroughly political’ and ‘nostalgically conservative’ figure (p. 13), whose work embodied a ‘ruralist nostalgia’ which reinforced ‘classic heteronormative assumptions’ and assumed an ‘overwhelmingly white and culturally Catholic audience’ (pp. 10, 12). One might suggest then that in the already fraught territory of the politics of the family and parenting, Dolto and ‘Doltomania’ have the status of a Barthesian myth, an allusion justified by Bates’s highlighting of Dolto’s ‘reassuring’ effect on her audience (p. 3). Bates offers a compelling analysis of this myth through meticulous and thoroughly documented research. He tracks the influence on Dolto of the 1930s psychoanalytic authorities, René Laforgue and Édouard Pichon. Their radically heteronormative concepts (for example, Laforgue’s ‘névrose familiale’) and defence of the Oedipal family unit, extending to Pichon’s rabid pathologization of homosexuality and insistence on the traditional division of gender roles, remained ‘cornerstones of Dolto’s later thinking’ (p. 38). A second chapter, ‘Dutiful Daughters’, discusses Dolto’s Catholic and anti-Dreyfusard background, evoking Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical memoir in comparison. Moving forward chronologically into the Occupation and its aftermath, Bates shows himself to be particularly adept at disentangling the ways in which Dolto’s barely ambivalent Pétainism played into the rifts in the institutional politics of psychoanalysis that led to her exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1953. In the later chapters Bates focuses, with the same perspicacity and measured tone, on Dolto’s championing of the cause of children (as long as the family unit stood firm) and her startling ascription of autism to the ‘pathogenic family’; before a final chapter, which analyses Dolto’s move beyond the terrain of psychoanalysis as such and occupation of the role of media star, through the extremely popular daily radio broadcasts she made from the mid-1970s on. If Bates succeeds in his aim ‘not so much to judge Dolto’s work as to historicise it’ (p. 232), the pernicious implications of her anti-progressive views, in Barthesian terms the abuses hidden in the myth, are starkly illuminated. Whether these are ‘the products of a particular set of historical circumstances’ (p. 232), or problematics embedded in psychoanalytic theory and practice, is a matter for further debate.