Archaic Echoes, the word and the transference in texts: A psychobiographical study of Franoise Dolto

The famous French psychoanalyst, Franoise Dolto (1908-1988), proposes a remarkable narrative of life between conception and weaning. Thoroughly original while loyally Freudian, Dolto discovers that precocious audition in a fluid blur of subject and object impacts psychical structuration, as phonmes inform nascent symbolization. Doltos oeuvre derives from the assumption that life is sourced in the unconscious, thus she delivers a powerful attestation of the primary processes. Following Freud, this study elaborates Doltos particularly salient theory-by-testimony of the transference as an inter-relational libidinal dialecticthe wild circulation of unconscious affects. Dolto is the foremost theorist of the archaic stage of psychical development, wherein originates the transference as securitizing continuity with our idiosyncratic libidinal histories. And Doltos unusual body of work, equal parts personal and professional, permits an exceptional demonstration of the passive movement of the autobiographical in the theoretical, as her own archaic echoes reverberate in homonymic repetitions and weighty silences. Finding such tracesa notion I source in Derridasuggests that the transport of dream-work through words produces in writing (thus enabling in reading) what I advance as the transference in texts. Doltos exploration of our unspeakable time before thought is supported by a half-century of clinical practice, and engaging Doltos complex material, I venture into six overlapping fields of words as objets mdiateurs: filiation, transmission, listening, reading, speaking and writing. Dolto proffers convincing evidence that primitive audition destines language to elude grammars, rooting it instead in filiation symbolique: a paradoxical ontology of melancholy and play, as dreams offer consolations for our difficult coming to reality, and we only advance on confirmations of archaic securitywitnessing. Thus bridging a compelling French corpus with English audiences, this dissertation unsettles biography, linguistics, literacy and pedagogy, as the investment of enigmatic phonemes with indelible significance troubles the word with a phantastic prehistory.