Dominique: the Case of an Adolescent interview with Jamieson Webster

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books in Psychoanalysis: Dominique—The Case of an Adolescent

Guest: Jamieson Webster
Host: Jordan
Date: October 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of New Books in Psychoanalysis features a deep dive into The Case of an Adolescent by French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, recently retranslated and reissued by Divided Press. Psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster—who wrote a blurb for the new edition—joins host Jordan to explore the book’s significance, its structure, Dolto’s radically intuitive clinical style, and controversies it raises, particularly regarding gender, law, and family dynamics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why This Book Matters

• Jamieson Webster expresses her long-standing admiration for Dolto’s case, arguing it rivals Freud’s iconic case studies in complexity and depth ([04:21]).
  • "It's the first case I've read that, to me, rivals Freud's cases...you could return to it. Look at what she's doing. There’s a million interesting moments..." — Webster ([04:21])
• The book’s form is unconventional—sessions are intertwined with theory, commentary, and indirect reporting, which creates both confusion and appeal for readers ([05:46]).

2. The Structure & Technique of the Case

• Dolto’s narrative immerses the reader in the clinical process: each chapter loosely matches a session but is expanded with theoretical digressions and after-the-fact reflections.
• The book’s development closely follows the moment-to-moment clinical reality, unfolding theory in tandem with the patient's progress ([06:50], [07:39]).

3. Setting & Central Clinical Predicament

• Dominique is a 14-year-old brought by his mother, presenting with severe behavioral and developmental disturbances: erratic behavior, inability to do math (which becomes central), and little previous therapeutic progress ([08:20]).
• The mother is portrayed as overinvolved, with sexual boundaries blurred; the father is largely absent, working in Germany, and emotionally distant ([09:18]).

4. Diagnosis and Psychoanalytic Frame

• Dolto uses the terms “autistic/psychotic” liberally; Webster links this to mid-century French psychoanalytic thinking, seeing "autism" as a provisional term for a child on the brink of psychosis ([09:28]).
• Only 12 sessions comprise the treatment—remarkably brief for psychoanalysis—yet profound transformation is observed as Dominique becomes able to speak, think, and separate from his mother ([10:28], [10:43], [11:05]).
  • "It's kind of a miracle care." — Jordan ([10:36])

5. On the Mother-Son Relationship and Incest Taboo

• Dolto’s technique emphasizes separating Dominique from the mother, seen as critical for any psychological development. She handles the mother’s problems both with direct criticism in the narrative and with careful, empathic language when speaking to Dominique ([11:52], [14:19]).
• Extended quote where Dolto interprets the incest taboo to Dominique—remarkably direct and explicit in laying down “the law of men everywhere”—sparks much discussion ([22:38], [24:11]).

6. Implementation of the Law and the Role of the Father

• Early in treatment, Dolto invokes the (often-absent) father as the external law; later, when Dominique asserts himself, she encourages his wish even if it means going against his father’s prohibition ([17:31], [18:39], [19:10]).
  • "Before he is able to speak for himself, she invokes the outside force. Once he's able...she lets him know he can figure out what he wants to do." — Webster ([18:42])
• This evolution models movement from heteronomy to autonomy: clinical authority cedes to the subject’s emerging desire.

7. Body, Knowledge, and Cognitive Symptomatology

• Dolto’s work foregrounds the body—bodily confusion is connected to Dominique’s mathematical struggles, spatial disorientation, and inability to symbolize ([26:53], [28:59]).
  • Dolto famously guides Dominique’s hand to a window latch, symbolically enacting separation and mastery ([27:03], [28:02]).
• Her theory combines imaginative, developmental, Lacanian, and Kleinian strands—often more heterodox than strict Lacanian analysis ([31:33], [34:00]).

8. Theoretical Eclecticism and Influence

• Dolto draws upon Anna Freud, Spitz, Bowlby, Winnicott, and Klein; her developmental and body-image theories are tailored for real child experience ([31:33], [34:00], [35:01]).
  • "You can’t work with children without having a scaffolding like this." — Webster ([34:00])

9. Cultural Impact and Institutional Legacy

• Dolto’s influence shaped French parenting, the establishment of “Maison Verte”—welcoming drop-in psychoanalytic centers for young children and caregivers, emphasizing speech and separation ([39:32], [40:29]).
  • "Every new child is an explosion..."—Webster on family dynamics ([40:58])
• 180+ Maison Vertes now exist; similar models spread to the UK and (possibly) New York ([40:03], [40:05]).

10. Colonial and Historical Context

• Background of colonialism and intergenerational trauma—the family’s time in the Congo, their racism, father’s history as a POW—haunt Dominique’s psyche ([42:04], [42:15]).
• Dominique embodies family secrets, grief, and historical dislocation ([43:09], [43:57]).

11. Contemporary Relevance: Gender, Law, and the “Trans Child” Debate

• The episode tackles how Dolto’s language about gender, sexuality, and prohibition reads today ([46:05]).
  • The foreword to the new edition frames Dolto as exposing the failure of gender categories rather than policing them—though Webster is skeptical about sanitizing or redeeming Dolto’s explicitly gendered language ([47:51], [49:01]).
  • "Do we think that even to say, say these things like you have a mother and a father...do we think that we're brainwashing the child into heteronormativity at that moment?" — Webster ([48:44])
  • Instead, Dolto’s “law” is presented as a framework for later arriving at one’s own position; contemporary readers can translate the law as needed ([49:28], [50:44], [51:11]).

12. Case as Enduring Text: Openness and Limitation

• Webster advocates reading classic and new cases critically, learning from both brilliance and limitation; Dolto operates through interpretation, not prohibition ([51:43], [52:03], [52:59]).

13. Style and Reception: Debate and Endorsement

• The hosts reflect on the angry contemporary reviews versus past accolades; Bob Coles’s 1973 endorsement as evidence of psychoanalytic promise ([54:23]).
  • "If anyone wants to know what psychoanalysis can make possible, read this case." — Bob Coles ([54:23])

14. Ending: The Question of Results

• Dominique’s newfound ability for abstract thought (math, family history) emerges only after the “law” is laid down; Dolto models not congratulating achievement but cultivating ongoing desire ([55:53], [56:25]).
• A closing announcement is made for an event in New York celebrating the book’s launch ([56:54]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It seems like the closest thing to say is autism…because you don’t believe that you can make a decree about psychosis until later...so autism might be the catch-all diagnosis at that point in time for a child who’s on the brink of psychosis, who feels like something psychotic dominates the picture." — Webster ([09:45])
• "It’s kind of a miracle care." — Jordan ([10:36])
• "It is you who are quite right. And your father would agree with you…in the law of all men, everywhere in the world…even with the black people who live all naked, it is forbidden for a boy to sleep with his mother." — Dolto, as quoted by Webster ([22:38])
• "Before he is able to speak for himself, she invokes the outside force. Once he's able...she lets him know he can figure out what he wants to do." — Webster ([18:42])
• "There's a great deal of care and like a core of their own dignity with one another. And once you're on the other side of the no more incest...the heavy hand comes down on the father." — Webster ([14:19])
• "I think that you can talk to children like this." — Webster ([25:07])
• "You can’t work with children without having a scaffolding like this. Does it have to amount to something normative? I don’t think so." — Webster ([34:00])
• "Do we think that even to say, say these things like you have a mother and a father…do we think that we're brainwashing the child into heteronormativity at that moment?" — Webster ([48:44])
• "It's the awakening of desire that's important. You don't have to recognize what it's…what it can do." — Webster ([56:25])

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Key Timestamps

• 01:06 – Show intro, book context
• 02:31 – Why Webster admires Dolto’s book
• 05:46 – Structure of the case and narrative complexity
• 08:20 – Dominique’s background and presenting problems
• 09:45 – Diagnostic ambiguity: “autistic/psychotic”
• 10:36 – “Miracle” of the brief treatment
• 11:52 – Mother’s character & the problem of incest/separation
• 14:19 – Dolto’s handling of the mother’s role
• 17:31 – The shifting authority of the father
• 19:24 – On pleasure, law, and supporting desire
• 22:38 – Dolto’s direct “incest law” interpretation to Dominique
• 27:03 – The bodily/mathematical breakthrough scene
• 31:33 – Dolto as heterodox in theory and practice
• 39:32 – Maison Verte and Dolto’s institutional legacy
• 42:15 – Colonial, historical trauma in the case
• 46:05 – Foreword: politics, trans child debate
• 49:01 – Modernizing/criticizing Dolto’s “law”
• 51:43 – On updating theory and acknowledging limitations
• 54:23 – Bob Coles’s preface; the book’s historic reception
• 55:53 – Dominique’s popes/mathematics achievement
• 56:54 – Announcement of book event

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Conclusion

The Case of an Adolescent emerges from this conversation as a challenging, layered, and not unproblematic clinical classic. Webster and Jordan deftly illuminate how Dolto’s idiosyncratic blend of intuition, theory, and empathy pushed the boundaries of child analysis—and still provokes debate about gender, law, and the meaning of psychoanalytic “success.” The episode models the very kind of interpretive openness, critical engagement, and respect for complexity that the book itself demands.

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For further discussion:
Jamieson Webster and colleagues will lead a reading group/event on the book in New York on October 17th ([56:54]). The revised translation is now available from Divided Press.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to New Books and Psychoanalysis, a podcast on the New Books Network. My name is Jordan, and today I'm excited to have with me Jameson Webster. Jameson Webster is a psychoanalyst and an author. Your most recent book, I believe, is on breathing, is that right?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yes. But today we're going to be doing something a little bit different. We're going to be having a conversation about a book Jameson did not write, but has some thoughts about and wrote a blurb on the back about. And that book is the Case of an Adolescent by Francoise d', Olto, the child psychoanalyst. The French child psychoanalyst. So this book, we were just trying to figure this out. So it was initially published in France in 1971, and then it was translated not that much longer. Afterwards, it was translated into English in 1973 by Ivan Katz. And the publishers of a recent retranslation by Divided Press got in touch with me and asked if we would be up for having a conversation about this book. Of course, the author is sadly no longer alive, and so we can't speak to her. So this book was just re released by Divided as a kind of revised translation by Lionel and Sharmini Bailey. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So just to kick us off. Why do you like this book?

[C]

I love this book for a really long time. It's funny because I recently just did a little search on Pepweb to see if anyone wrote about the first book.

[B]

Did you find this really hateful review? I was just about to ask you about that. Yeah, I have. I have some quotes from it, actually.

[C]

You read it?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it's not a case. This isn't even an adolescent. This is not autism.

[B]

From her own fertile associations and from the tenuous clues provided by the patient, she builds, like a novelist, an elaborate plot that ranges through the generations with a confidence that has to be read to believe that bit was, like, kind of interesting. And then he goes, what can one learn from this type of book? So this is some reviewer. His name is E. Anthony. I didn't know who he was. He wrote it in 1971. He says, what can one learn of value from this type of book? The clearest lesson is that psychoanalysis is extremely sensitive to all the nuances of culture. The British practice with this understatement, the Germans with a certain amount of heaviness, the South Americans with revolutionary fervor, and the French with a logic of their own that seems to be almost unexportable. That wasn't even the worst of it. He hates this book. Whoever this guy is, he hates it. And there's not much else that's been written about it in English.

[C]

He also went on to say that he doesn't even think it's psychoanalysis because it's only 12 sessions or whatever. Right. Yes. And that, you know, like, this was really disturbing to him.

[B]

Yeah. And then he compares it to little Hans, but then says, we've done so much better in the field of psychoanalysis since then.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So sort of both comparing her to Freud, but then also saying that she's awful.

[C]

Well, I feel the opposite. I feel like it's extraordinary. I feel like when I was reading it, it sort rivals. It's like the first case that I've read that, to me, rivals Freud's cases. Because I've had a long question about this, like, why Freud's cases are something that we can. Like, how was it that he wrote in a way that we can return to the cases again and again and again and learn from them and that, like, they're completely excavated in it. You always feel like there's more. And I remember this phrase that Lacan said about Dora, where he says. He goes, sure. You know, like, the first thing you want to do is draw up Freud's limitations and biases and, like, blind spots with Dora and, like, he even wrote the case himself to investigate that. And yet there's a depth that's achieved that's unparalleled, as if the keys fell from the sky into Freud's hand at the exact moment that he needed it. And he said, like, I don't. You would be lucky to reach this kind of depth at this point in time. It's just, like, very bombastic in his way. But there's something about this, for me, that I think is true. And so this case also seems to have something of that I think that you could return to it. Look at what she's doing. There's a million interesting moments that she puts down, but doesn't necessarily completely take account of.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things. I think we should probably explain a little bit about what's going on in the book. But one of the things that's quite difficult about this book is explaining what's going on because the form is so. And that. That is somewhat similar to some of Freud's case studies or to all of them, really, is that you're thrown into this world, right, where there's her sessions with the patient, some verbatim sort of quotations about what she said, what the patient said, background information, all kinds of theory that, like, you know, some chapters, each of the kind of substantive chapters, essentially, are supposed to be a session, although there's been a lot of commentary at the end, in the beginning. But in each session, you have no way of knowing how much of that chapter is going to be actually what happened in the session and how much is going to be. All kinds of ideas that she's come up with sort of on the hoof that for whatever reason, you know, no editor told her, you know, you need to structure this in a more sensible way. But that, I found, is also what's quite appealing about the book. Right. It's a sort of mad journey.

[C]

I mean, I also have the feeling that the points in time in which she relies on theoretical explication only up until a certain point is because it's very much of the moment that she's in with Dominique. So, like, when she has to talk about incest and the failure of, like, the paternal to separate, she doesn't talk about the symbolic, yet she doesn't talk about the possibility of accessing history, because if you are in a completely closed, symbiotic, incestuous space with no law, you can't get to that point in the theory. So she, you know, like, like she unravels the theory as the case unravels in a way that makes. In a way that also like, follows the development of theory as it even develops in the child, him or herself.

[B]

And she does say this at times when she's writing that she couldn't have come up with this idea until after the session. And also she'll say, it's not like I was thinking this during the session. I was just doing something sort of. I was trying my best. And then sort of a bit more of an explanation came to me afterwards.

[C]

Yeah. Of why she did something. Yeah, yeah. It's really remarkable in that sense. And you have a feeling for a level of intuitiveness with children and care on her part. That's extraordinary. I mean, that's really like very strongly conveyed in the case.

[B]

I mean, there's a lot of questions I have about how. Well, let's set the scene first. Okay, let's set the scene because otherwise people are going to be like, what actually happens here? Right, so who is Dominique? So what does she say? This child arrives to her, brought by his mother, who in her description is. She talks about him as having a very high pitched voice, as behaving very erratically with his body, as kind of ranting and raving and sort of rambling, sort of. She's unable to sort of make a lot of sense of what he's saying. And he's 14 years old when he arrives. Right. And he's brought there primarily. Is it because he's kind of struggling with school? He's very bad at math, which becomes very central, I think, to the case. And his mother has previously sought help for him with another therapist. That didn't seem to go very well. Was that kind of.

[C]

Yeah, let me see. I mean, you know, she calls him autistic and you know, autistic slash psychotic.

[B]

Which is another question I had actually reading it. I don't know if you were wondering about this as well, like what. And actually this angry author talks about it too. What is the diagnosis? She's kind of. But not entirely following a sort of Lacanian structural thing here. Right.

[C]

I mean, she was the Lacanian before Lacan, Francois Sosso. You know, I mean, in a way she says it's a child who can't make any sense. He doesn't make any sense to himself and he doesn't make any sense to anybody else. And so like the. It seems like the closest thing to say is autism. And it might be the case that you would say autism at that point in time because you don't believe that you can make a decree about psychosis until later, until there's like an actual psychotic break at a later stage. So autism might be the catch all diagnosis at that point in time for a child who's on the brink of psychosis, who feels like something psychotic, dominates the picture.

[B]

Right. And she has only 12 sessions with him.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And it's kind of a miracle care.

[C]

Miracle. Miracle. Unbelievable.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, what do you think about that?

[C]

You know, I believe it. I don't know. You follow the stages of it. And it's not that you don't think that he's going to not have problems anymore or that he's like not whatever he is anymore, but that he comes to speak and he comes to make sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And actually is quite dramatically and is able to show what he understands. Because on the one hand she was available to hear it, and it sounds like nobody was available to hear it up until that point in his life. But also because she effectuates a very important separation between himself and the mother.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, and so I don't know. I mean, that's the story of those 12 sessions, is that she's able to act in some way as, you know, not like the two of you get away from each other, but actually both of you would actually really like to not be in this predicament with each other.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And that, you know, she also like welcomes the mother, I think, in the sessions. You know, she's also like. She allows the mother some time to speak.

[B]

Yeah. The way that she deals with the mother really fascinated me. So she has this theory that is backed also by what Dominique and his brother tell her, that the mother. Yeah. Essentially does not have. Is too close to Dominique and to all of the children. And there's a particularly pivotal scene where is it Dominique says first and then the brother kind of confirms this, that when the father is away, because the father is often away in Germany for work, that the mother needs with a guy. Yeah. Yeah. So there's all these homosexual relationships as well that get alluded to, that the mother needs one of the children to be in the bed. What I found interesting was there are. When she's talking to the reader, the mother is portrayed in a somewhat critical light. Uh, she talks about her as sexually immature. There was a really funny bit that I quoted where she makes fun of her fashion. Do you remember this?

[C]

No.

[B]

Um, this is a bit of an aside, but she says Madame Belle's Style of dress, which is quite proper, marked by provincial taste, dating more to the past fashions of her youth than to the present, always includes some accessories that add a masculine note. Hat, shoes, glove or handbag. Huh. This is when she's talking about the sort of phallic.

[C]

Right. Like how do the hats, the shoes, the Hindenburg add the. Add the phallic. Masculine.

[B]

Yeah. And also, like, what, is she not supposed to wear shoes? Or like, I guess she's wearing particularly phallic shoes. I don't know. But that's a bit of an aside. She like, is funny because it's Lacan's.

[C]

The femininity as masquerade that gets very close to the masculinity as. As parade.

[B]

Right.

[C]

You know. Yeah, the peacocking.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

There's something she's. She peacocked a bit.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. And I assume when she's saying it's provincial taste, she's disapproving of it also. So what I was going to say is she's quite critical of the mother to the reader, but when she's speaking to Dominique, she says something along the lines of, your mother doesn't know any better because this is how she was raised. Right. And she actually tries to avoid setting up a situation where Dominique would blame the mother or she had.

[C]

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is the point in the case that people could get very upset about. One, the kind of implication that this mother was engaging in incest with the child to the way in which she's kind of heavy handed about the mother using these children for her own sexual gratification. Yeah, but I. Yeah, she's quite heavy handed about it. But I think that, I mean, the way that I felt about it when I read it the most recently was that it's at this moment that she's trying to effectuate the separation between them and place the mother in her own history. And that you see that when she speaks to Dominique about it or speaks to the mother, she does so with a great deal of care and like a core of their own dignity with one another. And once you're on the other side of the no more incest. Right. She's, you know, we should read her interpretation because it's wild to read the like, block text that she speaks to Dominique about how he doesn't want to be in bed with her anymore. Do you want to read it, Jim Moran? Do you know what it is?

[B]

Yeah, I think. Did I highlight this one? Is it 132?

[C]

It's like my favorite. Like, like, I remember my people in my reading group were like, you could say this. Like, this is something that can be said before we read it. You want to look for it before we. Before you read it. I would just say that once you're on the other side of this, what's interesting to me is that the heavy hand comes down on the father, you know, so, like, it's like she has to. She has to. She has to hold everybody to account and Dominique as well, you know, they all have to be accountable. And it comes down on the father who's gone.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And leaves his wife and is probably engaged in some, if not explicitly homosexual relationship, then at least a homoerotic one that he prefers to his wife and that he, it turns out, is the one who wants to stop them from separating. Remember? I mean, he basically trashes the treatment by the end of it. Sorry, spoiler alert. But, you know, and.

[B]

And he's the one who calls her 150% mother. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And, you know, so, like, it's part of the storytelling of what it means to break something and then show that there were other forces that were keeping it together and not just this mother's. Whatever, monstrous desire. And yet it is really hard to separate a mother and child because of the nature of the desire that's fueling that attachment. So, I mean, I don't know, like, should she have spoken about it in a different way or should she have used a different language, even though it's the private language that she's using to communicate with her readers? I don't know, because it's something about the story of what it means to, I don't know, topologically turn this entire case.

[B]

Right. So you mean something of the violence of the separation that needs to be done is also, like, comes through in the rhetoric.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it changes.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And then the rhetoric changes.

[B]

It really shocked me because that's that specific thing. And I think I found the bit we can read. But, like, early in the book, she's saying Dominique asks her whether they're going to. How often they're going to see each other or something like that. And she says, it depends on what your father thinks. And she really tries to sort of install the name of the father early on when she senses that he's been sort of relegated to irrelevance at Dominique's life. And it comes up a few times where she. She sort of. And she'll leave a footnote explaining to the reader you know, I did this very intentionally. I. Like I said that there was his father, even if he's not around, that we have to consult. But then later on, towards the end, when Dominique does start to express his own wishes, which are to continue seeing Dolto.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

She basically encourages him to transgress. And Dominique is saying, my father doesn't want me to see you anymore. He believes this is worthless. And she says, well, you could come yourself if that's what you want to do. You don't need to necessarily follow his wishes. So there's a weird change in how she treats the authority of the father.

[C]

But because he's already speaking at that point.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So before he is able to speak for himself, she invokes the outside force. Once he's able to speak for himself, she lets him know that he can figure out what he wants to do. And, you know, it's not that she says, disobey the father. She says that you could make a decision here. And he himself then says, okay, well, I will go make some money and I'll come back and see you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, in a little while, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And, you know, it's interesting because in that moment, is it transgressing the father? Is it inviting a future, you know, for him, you know, where he makes decisions for himself and can take into account what his parents want, but also decide?

[B]

I mean, there is also something very beautiful there. I remember where once, I guess it seems to her that sort of the incest taboo has been established sufficiently. There's a whole thing about. Dominique talks about how he enjoys wearing women's clothes, and we're kind of going all over the place, but that's. That's. That's the nature. Right. And she's a little unsure about the meaning of this. And she says something like, well, if your father thinks it's okay, like, then it's fine. But then she. There's a bit where Dominique says. Says something about things that are prohibited. And she says to him, there are lots of things that are fun that are not prohibited. And it's like, I. I was. I was kind of stunned at that moment because it was a very simple and I thought powerful statement where she was like, yes, there are things that are prohibited that you're not supposed to do, but there's also stuff that you can enjoy that's not prohibited. Yeah. And that seemed to be also at the moment when he starts to speak for himself, that she starts to kind of encourage his desire.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a You know, this is like the sense that you have that she's working in some ways, absolutely intuitively, but also has a theory that she works with, which is what it means, what the importance of separation for a child. The importance for an outside reference that you need to have. And if you have it, then you have the capacity to represent and speak for yourself as a subject, at which point you can make choices because the law is in place and there are plenty of things to dream about that are prohibited. There's plenty of things to do that can skirt the line, but maybe still the prohibition exists nevertheless. And she's, you know, like. And she has to. She has to work with that framework. I mean, I say this to students a lot because they, you know, like, feel like theory's, like, really authoritative and, you know, like, potentially.

[B]

And I can imagine, especially with all the gender politics that is implicated in this.

[C]

Right, yeah, yeah. But I said, if you don't have an idea, then what do you do? You know? And, like, you can. You have to have an idea and be willing to be wrong about it or revise it, but you still have to have an idea. You can't just have no idea. And I really believe that.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I mean, it's also what I love about the cases, because, you know, Freud himself, like, with Dora, you see his limitations. Like, you have to put yourself on the chopping block. Like, delta is on the chopping block here.

[B]

Nice metaphor. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Um, Yeah, I think it's. So is it page 87, this where. 87. 88, where Dominique is talking to Dolto about sleeping in the same bed as his mother?

[C]

Yes, this is. Yeah, this is the one.

[B]

Yeah. So which is the bit that you.

[C]

Read to students where they freak out.

[B]

Yeah, let's go straight to that.

[C]

Okay, so this is what she says to him after. Should we summarize? It's the whole question about him sleeping in bed with his mother, Basically.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

She says it is you who are quite right. And your father would agree with you. Your mother never had a brother. She's always been brought up in a convent with nuns. She doesn't know that when a little boy sleeps in his mother's bed and when he is up against her nightgown and that he doesn't have very much on, it does something to him. In his heart, he feels it's very bad for him to take himself for his mother's husband, because then he takes his daddy's place and it does something to him and his body. He doesn't know whether he is an animal or a little baby boy or a little baby girl. And it makes him stupid not to know what he is anymore. So you see, Mother tells you that if daddy were there, you wouldn't go into her bed. Well, in the law of all men, everywhere in the world, even with the black people who live all naked, it is forbidden for a boy to sleep with his mother. The boy can never be the mother's real husband. He can never love her. To make real children. Real children are made with the sexual organs of their two parents. The law of men is that the boy's sexual organ must never meet his mother's. What I tell you is the truth. Your mother wants you to know the truth. It is because your mother never had a brother and that she was brought up by the nuns. I repeat this parentheses that she has never thought of it. But ask your father. He'll tell you the same thing that I'm telling you. It is the law of all men.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, where do we begin?

[C]

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[B]

This also, I think, is the thing that really annoyed that reviewer. He was like, you can't talk to children this way.

[C]

I mean, I think you can. I don't see that many children anymore, but I used to. And I certainly see adolescents and I think that you can talk to them like this. I mean, I don't know whether I would use some of the rhetoric that she uses, but I certainly think that you can. And you know, actually the sort of Lacanian idea that you speak to the unconscious, I think is very important here. And, you know, all the business about you don't know whether you're an animal, a girl, or I love all the Animal stuff in the case. It's like. It's wonderful. But, you know, this. This had been what he was expressing to her up until that point in time with the clay and with his drawings was the confusion about the boundaries of his body. The question of what it means to have an erection.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The question of bodies that feel like an appendage to another body, and therefore, is it even a body?

[B]

Dio points out in the family, despite them having a very sophisticated vocabulary for all kinds of things, everything to do with the lower body for boys and girls, including genitals and excrement and everything else was called popo.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

There was no. There were no. There were no other worries. Right. It was all this kind of undifferentiated.

[C]

The wee wee. Maker of little Hans.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's not any. He doesn't have anything to. Any resources to draw on to differentiate himself. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And she does. She does a lot of work to sort of, like, put these differentiations in place.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And the amazing. The other amazing moment for me is not just that she says this wild interpretation or strong interpretation. It's not wild.

[B]

No. I mean, you know, maybe it's because I've drunk the Kool Aid, but I was. I found it very convincing. I was like, wow, she really hit the nail on the head.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

There's the moment, I don't know if you remember afterwards, where he comes in and she talks about his spatial bodily confusion, which is also part of his confusion with math.

[B]

Math, yeah.

[C]

And that she. She takes him to the. He wants to put the window down. Do I have this right? Remember? And she takes his hand in her hand and guides the. The latch, which is some, like, French latch that I don't understand, but I kind of get it. And it has the quality of the phallic vaginal form, I guess, or, you know, something inside another thing. And she shows him how it works. And this is the moment at which, like, it also seems to have this transformative effect of him being able to, like, lay out mathematically the entirety of his family's history.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And she comments on the side that she only would have touched him and showed him something this intimate and sexual, even in a symbolic sense, after she effectuated the prohibition against these.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But it's a very. I mean, it's a very beautiful moment of contact between them, of trying to then establish a knowledge and showing him that she's not afraid to touch him and have him know something about these organs that he can now know about, because there's enough separation.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And then he responds in kind with his own knowledge.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And she says, you know, she says something about this, that she gives him a knowledge that allows him to then have a knowledge for himself.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

I mean, you know, you think you just. You just knew to do.

[B]

All right. Yeah. How did you think about this? I mean, it's a really funny, like overlapping between sort of getting. Working on his cognitive skills and working on his psyche. Right. Because it, like, as you said, it's. It also is what enables him to. To do math spectacularly, like from being unable to do addition and multiplication and that kind of thing.

[C]

I mean, this I love. There's a long history of this. I mean, you can see it in various French child psychoanalysts, which I read a lot of and really appreciated. Even the question of the difficulties in the mirror and the spatial bodily left, right, confusions that have to be in place in some organized way to translate to even being able to read the letters on the page. Because, like, how do you flip a B and a D and a P and a Q? You know, it requires a bodily mirror, differentiation, sensibility, to not have those letters flying around or to be able to do something with math. I mean, it really is the question of the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And the child analysts were sort of brilliant at putting these various layers in place. It's not just psychological, it's not just an internal conflict. These are ways in which reality can and can't be lived and symbolized and represented that will affect you at school, affect the way that you can move through space, affect your capacity to do sports, affect your capacity to read a book. Yeah.

[B]

This is something I wanted to ask you about. I don't know if you know more about dil to. But in terms of. So it becomes very clear how important the body is for her. And it seems that that arises particularly out of working with children. And I had, when you get to some of the like appendices and later chapters where she kind of goes into psychoanalytic theory, she is working with a very. A more developmentalist sounding framework, particularly for the, you know, oral anophallic stages and that kind of thing than you would normally see in a Lacanian text. And I did find somewhere, I think it's in the four fundamental concepts. She apparently asked the kind of question around the stages and says, isn't it necessary to have some conception of these bodily stages in order to understand, you know, how. How a subject develops something like that? And he. He's a bit disapproving of that question and says something around how, if there's any kind of stage, it's to do with how castration operates in relation to different kinds of things, like the demand around toilet training and that kind of thing. Anyway, roundabout way of saying, yeah. What do you make of her talk about childhood development? And do you think it's a little bit heterodox within the sort of Lacanian world?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I guess it is. There's like, a very important way in which I think Lacanians, who specifically only see, I guess, adult patients, don't like the developmental model, especially as it, I don't know, played out in psychoanalytic theory because it led to ideas of deficit. It led to ideas of correction of the deficit or even corrective emotional experience, or it led to ideas of people who were more primitive or more advanced. And we know how much Lacan takes this on. So there was something important. Yeah, regression. There's something really important for Lacanians, I think, to try to get away from this, especially the idea of a normative development, as opposed to whatever the something that could then be classified as pathological or abnormal.

[B]

Right. And that kind of comes about in the critique of genitality, which I don't think she really has, but maybe because she's dealing with a slightly different thing, as you're saying.

[C]

I mean, her book, the Unconscious Body Image, is wonderful. I mean, it's a really interesting book that really tells you about what she understands about the layered construction of an unconscious body image and all of the different sources of information that inform it and that texturize it. And I really love that book. I mean, I often teach it, and there's moments in it which, you know, like, tear your hair out and. But you have to remember Francoise d' Alto was born in, like, 1901. But, you know, like, it can get very much like. And then a woman, a little girl, has to understand that she becomes a woman who can love a man. You know, like, you know, it just. It gets into that territory. But, I mean, if you just separate that out and you listen to the texture of what she wants to say an unconscious body image is. And you don't have to imagine it all leading to heterosexuality and, like, proper, whatever, cisgendered identification. Then, you know, you have a really interesting idea of what a mother's. Like, what the mother's face does when you have an idea of the back of your body, because you only look in a mirror and see yourself from the front. What does it take to understand that you have a back? Like, what about toilet training gives you a sense of the back of yourself? I mean, she really likes, you know, and like, you know what it means to have a bilateral body even.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I think that you can't work with children without having a scaffolding like this. Does it have to amount to something normative? I don't think so. And I think that that's where there's, like, very important critiques that are happening of psychoanalysis now. But do we. I don't think that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know, as it were.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. The other one that she. There's points, particularly when she's going over her theory, where I thought she sounded quite Kleinian, also, where she talks about the life and death drives in a way that's way more concrete than you would hear a Lacanian normally talk about them. I don't know if that's also part of the way she. I haven't read Unconscious Body Image, if she kind of goes into it there. But it's. And even this section we just read. Right. You could kind of imagine that in the little dick case of that totally towards them. Yeah. I mean, it seems she's drawing on. And she does talk about Winnicott as well. She's drawing on a wider tradition of child psychoanalysis, I think.

[C]

But the moment, I mean, like, for example, when Rosine and Robert Lefor wrote the Birth of the Other and they were working with Jenny Obery at the first hospital that was established for children who were abandoned after the war and failing to thrive, and there's no such thing as child psychoanalysis at all in existence in France, and they're trying to invent it from the ground up. They were in contact with Anna Freud and with Spitz and with Bowlby. I mean, like, it was a moment in which this, like, weird division of worlds and psychoanalysis did not exist. And all of the analysts were trying to deal with whatever the aftermath of the trauma of the wars and. And. And developing child psychoanalysis. And it's so rich. It's so rich to have this cross pollination which I think very sadly turned into these, you know, whatever. The race to build institutions after the decimation of psychoanalysis in Europe and then the factionalization and polemicization of it, that didn't. I don't think it did anyone any good, to be honest. And it's precisely when you see the child analysts with their urgency and with their Needing to build a theory, a method from scratch, that you see the possibilities of the openness that could happen between analysts, you know, and also the fact that the analysts could speak to the public differently than I think, you know, whatever happened later down the line. Because the most successful. I mean, you know, it's Winnicott, Klein and Dalto who became household names.

[B]

Have you listened to any of her broadcasts?

[C]

I haven't.

[B]

I haven't either, but it sounds fast. She did these. She read.

[C]

Yeah. She read letters from parents that responded to them live. Yeah, but if you do, you know that she appears in this, like, mega New York Times bestselling book, Bringing Up Bebe.

[B]

No, no, but.

[C]

So, I mean, like, you know, people still read this book. I forget what's written. It's, like, written maybe like in the early 2000s or something, but it was like a American woman who goes to France and wants to know, like, why the children don't have ADHD and why they're so well behaved and, like, what's wrong with her crazy American children. And, like, the French ladies are all scoffing at her.

[B]

Is this, like, from the 90s or something? Or is it from the 1990s or what? What?

[C]

No, it's more recent than that, you know, and she. So she goes and she investigates, like, the question of whatever, like French parenting. It's a revelation to her that the women feel that they should preserve themselves as desirable women and not just, like, you know, wreck themselves as mothers. It's not this, like, American, like, self sacrificing everything for your child, like, built into the culture's idea that a woman and her desirability and her sense of who she is apart from her children is important.

[B]

Needs to be.

[C]

Yeah, but that. That's culturally sanctioned. And the difference that that makes, that's like a big revelation for. You're not ashamed for it. It's encouraged the tradition of the creche and the early child. Like the early child development, that France has a whole world of that. And then she was like, well, how'd they get this world? And then she's like, there's this lady named Dr. Dalto.

[B]

Right. And so this is what Dalto is sort of advocating.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, there's also probably, you know, the remnants of the welfare state and all that stuff that makes it possible. But yes, ideologically, theoretically, I think ideologically.

[C]

And theoretically, she really changed something because she. She's. She comes at a moment in which, you know, like, France and you think, like, May 1960, but they had to Figure out how to absorb this into institutions for families. It wasn't just going to be Catholic Church anymore. And so Doltau came at a moment in which she set up the idea of the importance of family and mothers and attention to the development of children. That really had a huge impact across the board. And with idea of the importance of a woman's sexuality. Right, right. So she, like, absorbs the 68 changes, brings psychoanalysis in, and helps transform what would have been handled by the Church.

[B]

Right. And so you're saying it seems like the core of the message seems to be something like you have to carve out independence for yourself as a mother and for your child. And that even those two things are linked.

[C]

Yes. And that the. And that the. Like the Maison Vers that she set up, you know, that. You know, which. I love the plaque.

[B]

Yeah. People might be familiar with these institutions.

[C]

So she started one, and there's now 180 across France, which is a place that you can bring your child up until the age of five whenever you want. And there will always be a psychoanalyst on hand, but also what they call Welcomer.

[B]

Yeah, welcomers. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So it's a place where you can speak. The child can speak. The caregiver, whichever caregiver, can speak, even if it's a nanny, and then the parent can speak.

[B]

There's a version of this that's been set up in London called Bubble and Speak.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But based off of.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, Boozed off. We're hoping to set up one in New York. We're working on it. But the plaque on the door says a new child or a young child is a delicate moment, a precious moment, a difficult moment for everybody in the family. This is a place that you can come. Something like this, something simple like this.

[B]

Which I think resonates with that. That passage we just read, also in terms of this emphasis on, you know, saying like, your mother has had her own difficult time. Her upbringing was challenging these ways, and it didn't show her these things that are important. There's a kind of empathy or sympathy or whatever you want to call it for the. For all of the positions, I think, within the family and the difficulties they've had to deal with. That is. Yeah, I found that quite moving, actually.

[C]

Yeah. And then every child is an explosion, you know, like when, you know, every new child is an explosion. And of course, Dominique, the sort of background, the phantasm that haunted him was the father's brother that passed away.

[B]

Yes. That disappeared mysteriously. And then there's the sister, whose name, Sylvie.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Means in French, could also be understood as if he is still alive.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

And that's. Yeah.

[C]

And, you know, so the. There's a grief in the family that can't. That hasn't been metabolized and that has led the father to go away, that has led Dominique to be in the bed. There can never be an empty cot such that it would remind one of this grief. And she's putting together the conditions of whatever, you know, what haunts the situation and both keeps it stuck where it is, but also has led to the extreme conflictual nature of the relationships at home.

[B]

And there's a colonial history. There's a colonial history which is where the reference to the naked black people comes about. Right. Because that's to do with the mother's time in a nunnery in the Congo. Is that.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that the family. She watched the family treat the locals with great harshness. I mean, you have the sense that she had these racist colonial parents and to some extent she must have been saved by the nuns. Right. There's something about this, like that the nuns must have saved her from a family that sounded quite harsh, that they were in a place that they didn't want to be. And part of their way of dealing with the fact that they didn't want to be there was to hate the locals.

[B]

Right. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And then the father has a wild history, which I could never, like, I could never get it straight in my own mind.

[B]

But he was in a. He was in a German prison camp. Yes, but it's quite. Yeah, it's quite confusing. Was he captured by Nazis?

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah. And then the Germans become the bad guys, which sort of emerge in Dominique's play and fantasies and that kind of thing.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they. I mean, they're both. There's a colonial history. There's a. But it's also like there's something with the communists. Right. I mean, he's.

[B]

Yeah. I can't remember what happens to the.

[C]

Communist communists depending on. Because it was a transition from the sort of anti fascism to the anti communism. And he's somewhere, like, caught between the two. And the question of who, like, which side is he on? Which side is he on is sort of what becomes confusing in the case of the father.

[B]

Yeah. But then. But it does, regardless. It's like it shows how all of these world historical forces, they condense themselves into the figure of Dominique. But that's because that's what happens with any subject, right. That you're in your time and place and your fantasy life is going to draw on what's going on in the world.

[C]

Right. And he's both the bearer of the grief he somehow represents because he represents the one who must embody, can't embody the, the child that can't be mourned. And they talk about how he's born ugly, right. And part of his ugliness is to represent, you know, like whatever the, the, the, the racial history that like he's the object of racism in the family, that he's dark skinned, that he's ugly, that he's not beautiful.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is really funny and a bit embarrassing actually, but I tried to, I wanted to see what artificial intelligence would say about this case. And I don't know if you've seen there's that version of AI that Google has where you can put a PDF in and it'll like read the PDF and summarize it for you. And it had the most like, awful, kind of crass summary of what was wrong with Dominique. I think it tried its best to like fit it into some kind of neat psychological story. And the issues, the problems with Dominique were one, that he was called ugly, and two, that when his sister was born, he was dethroned and no longer the favorite in the family. And so it just, it tried to take, I guess, this story and, and come up with, well, the exact opposite, I think, of what Dalta is saying, which is somehow that, that some experience of lack within the family structure is what traumatized this boy when really it seems it was, if anything, a failure to register lack.

[C]

Yeah, it's a failure to register lack. Yeah, that. ChatGPT. It doesn't understand lack, does it?

[B]

Right.

[C]

This is why it lies all the time, because it has to hallucinate the minute that there's a, there's a lapse.

[B]

It's one thing I wanted, I wanted to make sure we touch on actually before we finish is we've been kind of circling around the politics of the book and this comes up quite explicitly in the foreword. So the foreword is written by Michael. I'm not going to pronounce his surname correctly.

[C]

Reisner Bezowitz.

[B]

There we go. Polish. Right. And it's a really lovely foreword, but at some point he wants to address what this case could mean for the trans child.

[C]

What does he say?

[B]

So he says, I have this, this quote here. It says, dolta's references to homosexuality, gender identity and stereotypes may alarm us if we take them to be prescriptive, if we Read her as advocating for a return to a kind of idealized vision of childhood and family life. The power of what Dalto has to say does not come from evaluation of these categories, but from her description of their failure, of the consequences of their impossibility and the solutions the psychoanalyst helps the child find. And then, yeah, on page 10 in the forward, he goes on to say that he basically talks about the failure to valorize the trans child as what might help to explain, says the incorporeal, derealized sense of suffering that is so often dealt with by suicide. The feeling that one's body is not one's own or even reality. I put a question mark around all of this. I wondered if he was slightly trying to redeem Dolto in a way that I wasn't entirely convinced, particularly when he talks about that what Dolto is saying is not a valuation of idealized categories, but a description of their failure, of the consequences of their impossibility and the solutions the psychoanalyst helps a child find. I'm not so sure. Yeah. What do you think about all of that?

[C]

I mean, the most heavy handed that she is about it is this world of men. The audience must have heard it. That's how the law is in the world of men. And your father, it's a little like Freud, like your father knew that one day little Hans would come into the world and he would love his, he loved his mother so much and he would want to kill his father. And his father also knew that, you know, and so like this, this language comes up that I think freaks people out these days. Me, it doesn't freak me out so much because I only, I feel like they're intervening in this early moment in which the child, I don't know, is trying to have a body, have an identification, put the players in place and then you can do with it what you want. And you know, do we think that even to say, say these things like you have a mother and a father, or like there was a sperm and there was an ovum, or there's a family that wanted a child? Like, do we think that we're brainwashing the child into heteronormativity at that moment? Are you trying to give them a semblance of order to organize themselves and then find what they want?

[B]

Yeah, well, exactly. That's exactly. I think what, what I was thinking about when, when in the foreword there's all this emphasis on the, the description of the failure of these gendered stereotypes and blah, blah, blah, is that I do. For her, it is important in some way, and we can maybe evolve the way that these rules are explained. So it doesn't have to be the law of all men, but the law of all people or whatever it is. But she does think it's important to lay down some rudimentary laws, right? That seems.

[C]

Yes, absolutely. And so the question would be, how would we do that today? In what way would we do it? With what language would we use? And also to be aware, like, I don't know, once there's the external womb and, you know, great save. Save women the trouble. But what are we going to tell children? You know, and you have to tell them something. I mean, I've seen. I haven't seen children in a long time, but, you know, if you have two mothers and they use sperm, where did the sperm come from? The kids wouldn't know. You have to be able to say something about it. And you have to understand what the family wants to say and what they can't say and what they're ashamed to say or what's confused in their saying. Yeah, because you're an analyst and you're attentive to this and to help the child find their relationship to it. I mean, I saw a child who came from. He had two mothers and he had sperm from a sperm bank. And then because of the sperm bank, he could meet all the sperm bank siblings, you know, like around, like around, like where the other sperm went, so that he has these half siblings. And the question for him was, why does someone make all these children? Who's the person? Because, you know, and like, who decided how many get to be made from the sperm?

[B]

Right.

[C]

And so I'm not, you know, you are electing to be part of a sperm sample that you can then have all these siblings. Like, he wanted to understand the desire behind these choices and the rules and to place himself in relationships. These are like really difficult, complicated questions. And the reason I think you can talk to children like this is because they're incredibly sophisticated and logical when they think about them. These.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And there's no normal here, but there is the presentiment of having to speak about speech, desire and law. Because these things exist. We have a system of representation. We have to place ourselves in relationship to what counts as representable. And we have to understand what rules there are and how we feel about them. We can hate them. We're gonna think they're strange, but we saw that those things are in place. And they're very. I think they're very Important for children.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And so I think that you can read this case and update it in your mind as we do with Freud or as we do with any case. And as should be done with our cases, I think like, we should write cases and we will be. Our limitations will be on display and we will be. We will be assessed for the future generations to come.

[B]

Can you imagine if Dolto was alive, what she would say if she were asked to weigh in on debates about trans kids?

[C]

I don't think that she would go the way of prohibition. I don't think that she would do that. I don't think that she doesn't have. She doesn't have that flavor for me. Because what she does is in speech. It's not an action. You don't have the feeling of her trying to cordon people into the correct behavior at all, whatsoever. Yeah, like, I really feel like that it's like she is an art of interpretation and contact. And so like, I'm always very like the analysts who end up on the side of like, we should prohibit X, Y or Z from happening. I'm like, where. When did you take up that role? Yeah, when did, like, when, you know.

[B]

I mean, it's kind of prohibit incest and then the rest has to be figured out. Right.

[C]

100. Yeah, but and also prohibit incest with speech only. She's not, you know, she's not removing the children.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Which they did. Right, right. Brutal. Bettelheim did this. Right. They separated all the psychotic children from their mothers and thought that was going to be the great saving grace for children everywhere.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. And she manages to do it in just 12 sessions and has some very interesting stuff to say about the. What a limited treatment can do and how she argues that spacing the sessions a few weeks apart, which is partly due to family circumstances. Partly.

[C]

And they're traveling from very far to see her.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Which is similar to what happens in the piggle, but that she thinks she says something like each session becomes a milestone.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. It's very similar to what happens in the pickle. Yeah, that's right. I also just wanted to say that the original Michael did this forward, but Bob Coles did the other one, which is kind of. It's like a weird factoid. It's like a very nerdy piece of information. But Bob Coles, when this came out in 1973, so he was like the child psychiatrist at Harvard and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his five volume work on children in crisis. And I just Like, I can't get it out of my head. This, like, 1973 scene of this Harvard guy reading this book.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And saying, yes, I will write a preface. And he says, says in the preface, like, something like, you know, if anyone wants to know what psychoanalysis can make possible, read this case. It's like, such a beautiful endorsement of psychoanalysis at a. I don't know, historically.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, I hope we managed to get a bit of a flavor of the book for the reader. But it is something that, as the angry reviewer said, kind of has to be read, believed in terms of what's going on in the text.

[C]

The math is done via the Pope. If you want to get into name of the father business. Right. Like Wikani and name of the Father. And then everyone's running around telling everyone, I have to be girls and boys. But it's not like you kind of realize in the case, you could understand something about the law of the father, the name of the father, the instantiation of separation or prohibition at this moment, in which Dominique, to orient himself, tells you about where he is in his family and what he understands about it by also, like, enumerating the popes, and he does, like, the perfect math in relationship to them. It shows his capacity to think. And it's like. It's about history, it's about transmission, you know, like one generation to the next. You know, it's about loss. Like, you know, the Pope is dead. We have a pope. So, like, because the trend, like, you have to recognize the loss of a pope and to have another pope, and that the law makes succession possible.

[B]

Right. Yeah. And I remember what was very fascinating about this is once Dominique establishes this incredible ability to do, like, equations that he couldn't formally. Dolto explicitly says she doesn't congratulate him on this and just moves things along. And she's kind of like, yeah, she understands that that's impressive and important to the mother especially, but to her, that's not really the point of the treatment. She doesn't say, well done, you know, we can finish now, which is a.

[C]

Huge argument in parenting right now that, like, you know, we congratulate children too much for nothing and, like, completely destroy their desire to do anything. And. No, but she's careful in that moment because it's. It's the awakening of desire that's important. You don't have to recognize what it's. What's. What it can do, you know, you don't have to recognize its feats. Yeah, it's to, like, support it and keep it going.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me about the book.

[C]

Yes. No, thank you.

[B]

I think. Are you doing an event on this as well?

[C]

Yes, we are. We are doing an event on October 17th in New York, which I hope will be a kind of like, just like a reading group, actually. Like, we'll read some passages. We're trying to get the book to everyone before it. And we'll have welcomers on hand. We'll have pen welcomers on hand.

[B]

So, yeah, for any listeners based in New York or nearby, that will be really exciting, I think. Launch by Divided Press for this really fascinating and incredible revised translation of this book.