‘An energy unknowable in itself’: an extract from ‘Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent’

Despite standing alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. This week, Divided Publishing brings back into print – in Ivan Katz’s translation, newly revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly – her 1971 case study Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent. Jamieson Webster hails it as ‘the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence.’ Read an extract below, and find out more about the book here.

This story will surprise no one who has come to understand through psychoanalysis that the human being is the symbolic incarnation of three desires – his father’s, his mother’s, and his own, all three of them language-bearers. It is not possible to be a child psychoanalyst and not have this faith in the child, the subject of a desire of his own, as borne witness to by his breathing body. And this, whatever may be the arguments of those who view the baby as a vegetative digestive tract, free of any symbolic human significance – those who do not believe that the act of living of a baby whom others view as ‘preverbal’ – is the expression of the word – the signifier of the verb ‘to desire’ – having unconsciously become flesh at the moment of conception. What they deny is that the growth and death which are this child’s destiny are symbols of an energy unknowable in itself, seeking its fulfilment through the mediation of meaningful encounters, each a link in a chain of meanings, and all together testifying to a meaning which man’s life and death do not, by themselves, suffice to signify. This energy is our origin as it is all about us; it is the intelligence of our flesh, of our behaviour, of our gestures, and of our words; all these are but the substantial or subtle thickening of the verb ‘to be’ of which we are manifestations, but which does not belong to us.

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Thus all adults – unconsciously, by their linguistic adaptation (in the widest sense of the term) – become traitors towards what they perceive: they form the habit of not really expressing it, of repressing it at an earlier or later stage of their life. What they feel but cannot express may then remain as an enclave, without means of expression. Music, like language, constitutes a means of expressing physical and emotional tensions, in sounds, in a way distinct from language; it represents a ‘sublimation’ of drives and affects rooted in the oral stage. It uses these drives and affects through an expressive organising of the frequencies, rhythms and modulations inhibited by the spoken language. Similarly, within any group, decency sets limits to the freedom of bodily movements; it inhibits the language of the body. Within this framework, dancing liberates the expression of what has been inhibited. It is a sublimation having its roots in the subject’s former anal period. Drives and affects can all be ‘sublimated’.

Whatever field of language he expresses himself in, every artist of any sort is the mediator of forbidden or inhibited expressions. It is left to his creative imagination to liberate what has been inhibited and could not find expression in its time. He is able to express what he is presently living through, not merely what he has archaically lived through. He does this in his own way, outside the usual interpersonal language. His art specifically reflects his original libidinal structure, and this often causes artists to be viewed as overgrown children. Wrongly so, because the adult’s libidinal urges spring from a biological substratum connected to a genitally mature bodily schema; they differ fundamentally from those of the child he once was. He has acquired his creative and social power, and finds his own authentic unmistakable voice, by overcoming the fear of oedipal castration and by integrating the incest taboo.

Extracted from Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent by Françoise Dolto (trans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly), published by Divided Publishing, priced £13.99.