THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL PRACTICE OF FRANÇOISE DOLTO AND THE USE OF CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS

This essay articulates some considerations about Françoise Dolto’s analytical practice and her approach to analyzing drawings of child patients. It presents a brief description of some fundamentals describing Françoise Dolto’s clinical practice, followed by some theoretical-clinical considerations on children’s drawings in the psychoanalytical process. It highlights that Dolto did not use toys or drawings as mediators but made use of pictorial productions to investigate what was repeated in the representation that resonated with the child’s symptoms and was figuratively expressed through the unconscious image of her body through its signifiers


Introduction
From her outpatient consultations at the Salpêtrière hospital, then at the Bretonneau and Trousseau hospitals in Paris, Françoise Dolto's singular contribution to the practice of psychoanalysis with children is evident.This paper seeks to articulate the historical background to Francoise Dolto's work and the theoretical concepts that underpinned her clinical practice with children and, above all, the use of her child clients graphic productions.Dolto's main premise was that, from conception, children are beings of language, subjects, and should be treated with correspondent ethical consideration.At that time she started her practice as a pediatrician, infants were treated as "digestive tubes" and were even subjected to invasive procedures without anesthesia -abominable practices from Dolto's point of view.
It is at this point that another of her ideas -based on the practice of pediatrician Dr. Ribadeau-Dumas, who established that nurses should speak affectionately to infants -such as putting words to experiences, was implemented in the hospital: she requested that nurses talk to the infants, without touching them, quoting the names of parents, siblings, to give meaning to their experience of separation.This intervention resulted in a decrease of the number of newborn deaths in that institution.Dolto illustrated how an individual is constituted as a subject: communicating with the children using words, translating emotions, talking about the child's history and sufferings, would generate a humanizing, symbolic and structuring relationship with her unconscious.It is understood that the child is born with a history, foreseen by the desire of the parental figures, through a filiation of language (Dolto, 1994).The child's belonging to the history of a group is demarcated by the language, which is constituted by a transgenerational symbolic interweaving.Thus, in order to become a subject, she receives a name that is invested with the parental desire (Dolto, 1984(Dolto, , 1994(Dolto, , 1998)).

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The transgenerational sense of this dynamic is due to the fact that, as theorized by Dolto (1981), the desire of parents is linked to the desire of grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and so on, so that the subjective constitution of the subject is determined by the psychic influences of people from several generations.In other words, the history of each person is conceived and desired from the history of our ancestors, from the family saga that our relatives have built -and build with one-.The way one relates as well as one's projects for the future are linked to the network of meanings created and exchanged within one's background.These projects can either repeat a familiar symptom -being unconsciously loyal to that family symptom -or break with it.However, before this child is born, a couple must give birth to her.At birth, this immature being does not yet have a complete neural structure and, as such, needs the care of her mother or of the figure who plays this role, which favors the formation of psychic registers and the construction of an unconscious image of the body, which is the result of the association between bodily experience, somato-psychic impressions and emotions focused on the erogenous zones (Dolto, 1994).This image functions for the baby as a substratum of a rudimentary and subliminal perception of herself.She does not yet discriminate between herself and her environment, but her interoceptive, tactile, olfactory and auditory sensations.Equally, the infant is not able to perceive herself as different from the figure of her caregiver, nor even from the objects that surround her -she experiences the somato-psychic experience as if the other was an extension of her body.
Thus, the infant remains symbiotic with the caregiver.It is in the continent of this symbiosis that the child organizes and perfects the construction of her bodily perception and the notion of being inserted in a multifaceted space, through which different smells, textures and sounds travel.This multiple focus dynamic is all the more evident the more secure the child feels in the attachment with her caregivers.
Once she has fully experienced her primary experiences, she  Dolto (1988) explained that the development of the human psyche is characterized by castrations that are frustrations.These frustrations frame and limit the individual constitution, through a sense of belonging to a social norm.In fact, castrations are investments of affect in the form of limits and love, which are, indeed, frustrations of hedonic possibilities.
They serve to liberate the subject from archaic (regressive) states that lean towards the satisfaction of fantasized unlimited pleasures.
All this to inscribe the individual in the sphere of humanized relationships and mark the passage to a qualitative stage of psychic functioning that updates the perception of the self, of the other and of the environment, allowing the individual to become increasingly autonomous and capable of complex symbolizations in his environment.In this way, the psychic organization will form models of traits and behavioral patterns that will constitute the personality of the individual.On the clinical level, it is a matter of being impartial and helping the child to find means of expression of her repressed drives, adapting her to the average demands of her continuum of development and personal ethics, in order to facilitate the satisfaction of the legitimate demands of her desires, but without echoing her regression.The analyst must look for the economic logic associated with the child's behaviours in order to understand which is her most advantageous mechanism of pleasure, even if it is at the origin of her sufferings and her maladaptive reactions.
This alerts us to the fact, quite common in analytic practice, that, in the course of treatment, and often from the very beginning, patients feel better and some of their symptoms may even disappear.However, this "healing" is only apparent, since it is only the effect of the transference.
The cure is only assured when the analysand, in addition to the stable disappearance of symptoms, can face the real difficulties of life, without anguish, through a spontaneous attitude towards demands, according to an ethic within the environment in which the patient chooses to live, while allowing the adequate translation of her drives, which ensures the preservation of the acquired equilibrium.
During consultations with children, there is no difference in the process.The analyst has the task of listening and observing gestures, language lapses and spontaneous scenes from which it is possible to enter into the life of the child's imaginative representations, affectivity and symbolism.
Françoise Dolto indicated that, in her clinical practice, she was determined to become the substitute for the transferential fantasies of her patients.Thus, she did not propose the goal of facilitating the disappearance of symptoms but, rather to follow an individual towards the understanding of his relationships with others, through the comprehension of her entire personality, including her symptoms.For Dolto, the analytic act would free the individual from his symptom because such an understanding would free him from the cathexis of fixation in his body.Since such cathexis would not be available to language, her method would focus on the process that happened between the speaker and the listener, during analysis.The work with children, then, would be shaped by this mediation.In this sense, Françoise Dolto's practice was essentially intersubjective.
The main condition for this participation would be the child's desire to talk about her feelings and thoughts with the analyst.From there, Dolto created a strategy to symbolize the child's desire to be heard.This strategy also facilitated the management of resistance.In an interview published in 2008, she explained about that symbolic system of payment: "It was on account of the negative transference that I understood the role of the child's symbolic payment.The children who were brought to us, because they were supposed to be suffering, and who would benefit from psychoanalysis and sometimes did not even know, were not even aware that they had something to express, but, that they had paranoid reactions, reactions of hatred and hostility… thanks to which these children survived… but that hinders society, and that hinders their future development, in fact, that worries society, that worries their parents (... Once the framing was determined and the child expressed a desire to be heard, Dolto would sit next to the child (but not in the child's field of vision) and invite her to say through words, drawings or plasticine manipulation everything that she thinks or feels during the time of the session, even about things that, she knows or believes should not be said (Dolto, 1981).In the meantime, Dolto was engaged in some activity: sometimes sharpening pencils while listening, sometimes making simple structures with plasticine.This symbolic act represented the analytic frame in which each participant had a role: the analysand to produce associations and the analyst to listen and interpret them.
Moreover, Dolto was interested, in general, in the child's associations through these verbal and nonverbal mediators, and not in the actual events in the child's life.Her role was to exercise the position of someone who listens and announces the emotions that cannot be named due to the repression of the contents, through the transference.The transference for Dolto refers to the idea that the child places the analyst in the position of the parental figures in a given period of her life when the child believed that her parental figures were talking to her about and other elements she imagines and projects into her drawingstherefore, no isolated graphical traits can be interpreted a priori.
This illustrates another aspect of the ethics of Dolto's practice: she explained that it was important to treat children with the same formality used with adults (if they wanted it) to indicate that they were not friends and should establish a curative relationship.It also illustrates her hallmark of putting in simple words the meaning of experiences and the unconscious dimension associate with it (Dolto, 1974).
In her daily consultations at the Trousseau hospital, her assistant would invite the child to the consultation room and Dolto would introduce her to the observers for her first session.Sometimes family members could observe the session so long as they did not interfere in the process.
After the production of drawings, Dolto observed the sequence of drawings produced, sometimes she would prompt the child to speak of a dream or simply observe the patient, because, according to Dolto, every act, even if apparently banal, has a meaning.From there she interpreted the meaning of the plot of memories, of mourning and of the relationship with the oedipal conflict, or anything that could signify the function of a symptom or dynamic.
In one of her writings, Dolto (1988) stated that the absence of adequate explanations about parental dynamics (the non-said) can lead the child to internalize that her parents have committed a faulty act.The result could be that the child identifies with this representation of their imagos, repeating their faults through identification, positioning herself against or breaking the rules, imitating any other behavior considered faulty in the eyes of society.Unconsciously, the child tries to join her parents in this act in order to maintain the feeling of belonging.In this sense, Dolto Tuesday in that hospital for 38 years, from 1940 to 1978.Her patients were babies, children, adolescents and her narcissism.Omissions and lies about her history would become the origin of the symptoms.Corroborating with Lacan, Dolto accepted the paternal function as central in the psychic structuring of the child, defining the maternal function as the one in charge of performing the passage of the father's name and mediating the relationship with the others, which would form the experience of the continuity "I -Other" -basis of narcissistic security-.She also pointed out that the child's symptom could be a response to the parents' symptoms and would express what she does not dare to say within the family structure.
assimilates and signifies the valences of power relations established in the relational context in which she participates.Her perception begins to consciously realize the position that the maternal figure occupies in relation to the paternal figure (or other), establishing the substantial difference of the Oedipus -a moment defined by Freud in which rivalries and identifications impregnated with love and hate foster the awareness of sexual differences.The Oedipus Complex is inescapable during the development of the individuals.If it is not resolved, anomalies, impediments, aggressive and passive libidinal tendencies appear, which interfere in the social adaptation of the individual.If it is resolved, the individual submits to castration anxiety, develops normally and adapts to societal norms and demands.However, here, there are two possible routes: one, to escape through mental inhibition or of activities, and factual runaways; or to protest by regressions to archaic stages characterized by unsociability or perversion.The common denominator of these archaic possibilities is guilt.If guilt is punished, it generates the feeling of inferiority which fuel aggressiveness; and if it is not punished, the individual uses self-punitive mechanisms.Graphic 1: Outcomes of the resolution and non-resolution of Oedipus Complex.For Dolto (1988), in this context, the person who exercises the paternal function is the one who exercises the humanizing function, at T he psychoanalytical practice of Françoise Dolto and the use of children's drawings.Dilcio Dantas Guedes Revista Científica Arbitrada de l a Fundación M enteCl ara Vol. 9 (2024), ISSN 2469-0783 8 the same time separating and investing on the receiver of the humanization (the child).This means that the one in this role signals to the child that the one who exercises the maternal function does not own her, just as signaling to the one who exercises the maternal role that the receiver is not only her product and object of investment.It is then that the child completes the process of construction of the differentiation of the self, internalizing the discrimination of the notions of gender (and of her sexuation, meaning the way in which the child is inscribed in the difference between the sexes, specifically in terms of the unconscious and castration).According to this paradigm of triangulation, one of the angles of this triangle -that which exercises the paternal function -"launch" an abscissa, crossing the filial and maternal figure line, which represents the cut, the "castration" of the symbiosis between both the filial and maternal figure poles.This allows the interdiction of incest and the introduction of the child in the field of human socialization.This interdiction inscribes her in the order of the being Human, in the sense of being a "being of culture", socialized within the norms of social coexistence and centered on the production of sublimatory knowledge and doing.In other words, breaking the fusional love between the one who exercises the maternal role and the child ends up imposing one of the founding rules of interdiction of human interaction (the incest), introducing the child in the network of human relations, placing her in the position of a desiring being who needs to produce something in order to achieve what she lacks.Depending on how this journey is carried out, the individual will present himself in a singular way, but always referring to his origin.

For
Dolto, in order to develop as an autonomous individuated, creative and social human being, the child must overcome different levels of castration, such as structural frustrations (umbilical, oral, anal and symbolic) which are not only the intersection between erogenous zone and drive, but modalities of encounter with the other, leading to individuation and progressive introduction into social norms.The triangular juncture would function as a platform from which the paternal and maternal functions would be exercised to balance gratification and limits (as structural frustrations).If the gratifications exceed the limits or vice versa, this imbalance would generate compensatory impulses associated with fixations and delay in the progress of the child's psychic development.
he psychoanalytical practice of Françoise Dolto and the use of children's drawings.
).Well, with this one, I understood that I had to tell her that, 'but you are quite free not to want to come and talk to me, if your parents bring you to me... T