The doll-flower of Francoise Dolto

The doll-flower. It is a doll made on the model of a daisy. Dolto intuitively came up with this in a therapy session with a girl she calls Bernadette, a 5-year-old girl with a severe developmental delay. Bernadette looks cross-eyed, her left arm is folded, her left leg drags a little. She is constantly fantasizing, she speaks with a monotone voice, she screams, she shows a stereotypical smile and she refuses to eat. The eating has been a problem since birth, and to such an extent that she had to be fed rectally or with subcutaneous injections.  After 10 days, she was able to retain some milk mixed with water, and she learned to drink milk. The difficulties in eating recurred regularly, for example when she learned to drink soup at 7 months and when she refused to eat or drink for 15 days, being 18 months old.

In the second session with Bernadette (March 1947) she draws an abstract spruce tree - a red and yellow triangle, bordered by green, and "houses", with "boules qui éclatent les maisons". She fables about "ses trois filles, ses deux bébés qui toujours chosent dans la bouche, cassent la bouche ou le ventre". She is glad her mother is not there, "papa toute seule". [1]  During the third session Dolto learns to know that Bernadette fears the return of her mother; she eats better when mother is not there. When mother telephones her from abroad, her daughter immediately starts spitting. Dolto notes that the girl experiences her body as an oral erogenous zone, confusing the digestive tract with the body of the mother, who is absent for her need and desire to eat. The genital female sexual desire is associated with the father.

When mother is back home (June 1946), Bernadette says: “Maman veut pas que je mange, elle veut voir dans mon cardiaque, elle est méchante, elle veut toujours fouiller dans mon coeur, mais ce n’est pas moi qui dis ça, c’est la guenon qui dit ça.”[2] Dolto suspects that the girl has heard something said about the heart, because of the stomach cramps, and that she connects heart, stomach and house: "dangerous balls that make houses burst". At the same time, there is also a story about a sexual reproduction, featuring oak leaves being planted in the ground.

In October, Bernadette talks about the "guenon[3]" who says so many bad things about her mother, a girl-monkey who is naughty, because she loves Bernadette very much, so much that she wants to get inside her. When Bernadette eats, the guenon wants to be eaten at the same time as the food, and then Bernadette will become a guenon too. Meanwhile, Bernadette has met Dolto outside the consulting room, and she is angry, because Dolto "really exists", so the guenon must also really exist. After all, when Bernadette comes home, she is fantasizing about Dolto as much as about the guenon. Mother describes how her daughter, after the meal, punches herself on the stomach to make that guenon come out. Meanwhile, Bernadette draws only abstract forms, decorated with letters and rotated numbers; some of them naughty or ugly. Dolls, animals, even the spruces she had drawn during the second session can no longer arouse her interest.

Dolto speaks of narcissistic behaviour, with a negative affectivity, and she notes that the symptoms express themselves in the zones of the oral drives. She is struck by the paranoid allure, autistic and anxious, in the child. And here she comes up with the idea of giving the child a doll-flower. She had noticed that the interest in flowers and the identification with a flower, when drawing, seemed to appear with the clinical picture of narcissism. For children with anorexia, the stems of the flowers in their drawings could represent a kind of continuity with themselves, through the connection with the nourishing soil. When Dolto asked the children where they situated themselves in the drawing, they projected themselves into the flower, into the cut-off stem. For the older girls or the narcissistic women, the decorated flowers prevailed.

The mother tells Dolto that Bernadette no longer likes flowers or plants, and so Dolto has the impulse to ask her if Bernadette would like to be a doll-flower ? Bernadette jumps up for joy, the mother asks what that might be, and Dolto answers that she doesn't know, but that Bernadette clearly wants it. Dolto suggested the mother to make a doll, with arms and legs covered in green cloth, and with a head that without a face, shaped like a daisy. Dolto has noticed that this is the first flower-representation of all children, boys or girls, as a kind of symbolisation of the libido of the subject who is not aware of his genitality (or represses that awareness).

The next time, Bernadette comes with "Rosine", her doll-flower, which has thus become feminine. She says the doll is very naughty, she hits on human and animal dolls. Bernadette has projected her own negative attitude onto this doll-flower. The doll is naughty because there is a man with a cane giving her bad ideas, a man who looked like a moon. (A few sessions earlier, Bernadette talked about something she had said to her father: "ne te lune pas". So the man is her father). But there is not only this man giving her bad thoughts, she replies when Dolto asks about them. And she bends down to Dolto, and whispers in her ear that being naughty has to do with her arm and leg not moving properly, that it is her way of being nice. She is ill, she is not naughty. And she says Dolto will take care of her, she leaves the doll with her.

When she comes to pick up her daughter after the next session, the mother tells Dolto that Bernadette has changed very much in the last two weeks, especially since she left the doll-flower in Dolto's care. Today Bernadette has brought a plush bear which she considers to be her child and which she installs on the divan. She draws three daisies, she names them Daddy, Mummy and Bernadette, and then she asks how the doll is doing. Dolto thinks that Bernadette should judge for herself, because "only a mummy knows her children", and then there is a scene in which the child speaks to the doll, brings it to her ear to hear what she says, and then she puts it on the table and says that she is cured. She puts the doll next to the bear.

She shows Dolto her hand, with which she can still only clumsily scratch, and she says that it is a wolf girl who should scratch to love, and will show how strong she is to show how much she loves. She puts her fingernails very deep into the skin of Dolto’s hand, until there appears blood. She asks Dolto if it hurts, yes, a little, but Dolto knows that it is because the wolf girl loves her. And then Bernadette caresses her hand, with her own right hand, the hand of a human girl who would never do anything bad.

By the tenth session, a clear motor progress is evident, Bernadette is practising with her left hand and left leg. She shows a negative attitude towards Dolto's child, "she loves her rabbit more than Dolto's dirty child, doesn't she think it's dirty?". Dolto says that a mother never sees the faults of her child, but perhaps she is right.

January 1947.  Bernadette draws a shape, a wolf angel, an upside-down man, a beautiful tree, an angel of angels, but she can't think of anything more. So Dolto says that perhaps she can imagine going into the water - again with the aim of exploring the affects of the oral stage. Bernadette's immediate response is positive: she is in the water and there is a big fish that has swallowed its tail, and there is a second fish that changes the first one because it is too unhappy. That second fish gives Bernadette a box with a beautiful doll in it. Afterwards she says that it is a pity that it was a fish and that it is not true, because she never had that doll. For the first time, there is a difference between fantasy and reality.

The next time, there are many aggressive statements towards her sister, who is 20 years, and while Bernadette is speaking, she imitates stabbing or crushing. She cuts out all kinds of angular shapes, which are sometimes wild animals, she says, like her sister. She tries to keep them upright, to make them live, because then they can also die. Then she uses the clay to make two little balls which she calls "pipi'', and she says she has one close to the pipi, and two close to her sister (while showing two nipples under her clothes).

Following this there are a number of sessions in which the girl says a lot, with a lot of gestures, without logic but also without much distrust. She draws a blue chair that should not be eaten because it would crack. She draws a brown sun, a little boy who comes after her and of whom she is jealous, the dirty child. She talks about her mousetrap and she touches her belly, and then she draws horizontal eights, pages full. Then lines that intertwine. She associates oral, devouring aggressive, killing things.

In March, Bernadette talks about the monkey that lives inside her, he wants to bite, she doesn’t. She sings about a tree that has recovered, the sun has returned, she draws a tree whose trunk has been rebuilt: the little wolf girl who was saved by her father. She draws herself as a big yellow flower. She laughs a lot, and before she leaves she applies itching powder to the doll.

Then something happens at home. Bernadette wants to hold a ceremony in the presence of her parents and her sister; she has placed all her dolls and her animals as spectators in a semi-circle, at the feet of the grown ups for whom she has prepared chairs. The guenon, a small figure from her ark of Noa, brown and with clear breasts, is the central object of hatred, the scapegoat responsible for her not being able to eat and live. Bernadette begins a kind of dance, around the guenon, until the moment when she suddenly destroys the figure, using both the bad leg and the good leg. However, she does not succeed in destroying it completely, which causes a great deal of excitement, and she asks her father to help her. Her father hesitates but finally smashes the small statue with a few hammer blows. After destroying the guenon, Bernadette immediately calms down, she smiles, she has put the other figurine from the zoo, also a monkey ("son singe"), under two trees, and she says that now he can finally rest, waiting for father to buy a white guenon that will be a good female.

The story is told by the parents; Bernadette herself also talks about the whole history of the lynching, but still very confused, with all kinds of incantations, aggressive gestures with the scissors, with the paper, with the pencils, a kind of screaming elation, and then there is relaxation that brings back the calm. She leaves.

After that session, things continue to go well for Bernadette. Three more sessions follow, in which she makes objects in clay, in the shape of an extended cylinder. Nobody is allowed to touch them, because if  someone would do so, he would die immediately. Although the next session clearly shows that the objects have become ordinary modelling clay again, she continues to talk about them in the same way, and she covers the table completely with hollow forms, objects, which she qualifies as "bags", and again the objects can kill. Everything she does is magical, she says, except for the last thing. Each of the objects is wrapped with a piece of string, twisted in the shape of a loop, and the last object she made for Dolto is a tombstone, and under it she puts a phallic shape, “a sword” - which is again very dangerous for Dolto, and because it is only a statue, it is not true!

Since then, Bernadette has developed normally, there is still some dragging with her left leg and still some reduced mobility of her left arm, but she can now use it to hold things.

But what actually happened there ?

Dolto gives us some assumptions, precursors to her later theory on the unconscious image of the body and symboligenous castration. The article "Cure psychanalytique à l'aide de la poupé-fleur" dates from 1949. Although the text seems to make use of what Dolto describes as "l'image inconsciente du corps", the term "image of the body " does not yet appear in it. In "Personnologie et image du corps" (1961), she speaks of the force underlying the graphic or plastic compositions of children, which she proposes to name "image of the body ": : “Le médiateur de ces présentifications, dans les représentations allégoriques, s’est montré être spécifique : c’est la reférence au corps, qu’il soit directement ou indirectement impliqué dans son anecdotique existence actuelle. Ce médiateur, nous proposons donc de l’appeler l’image du corps”.[4]   In 1984, L'image inconsciente du corps is published, in which she describes how to work with this projection of emotional experience, as a kind of "psychic container".[5] But, she stresses, the body image arises from the symbolic elaboration of the emotional relationship to the two parents, not from the sensory relationship as such. [6]

I will reproduce some quotes from the article below, supplemented by what it has meant to me - based on those parts of her theory which have helped me to understand what she is talking about.

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 136

[2] Ibidem, p. 137

[3] “Guenon" is a word for a kind of monkey, but it is used in French as a swear word for an ugly woman, in contrast to the male "singe" that appears further on in the text. This contrast also appears elsewhere in the book, where she speaks of “le Ýa est représenté en singe anthropoïde ou en guenon – suivant le sexe”.
Ibidem, p. 91.

[4] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 73

[5] Hall, Hivernel & Morgan Theory and practice in Child Psychoanalysis. An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto. London/New York, Routledge, 2018, p. 44

[6] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 74

1. “Devant ce tableau, où je vois dominer l’organicité, et ce dès la naissance[1]

Dolto notices how the organic problems dominate in Bernadette’s story, and in the sequel she describes how she initially did not think of a psychoanalytic treatment for this girl. She doesn't elaborate on it any further - at least not here, possibly this theme will be taken up elsewhere in her work.

Catherine Mathelin writes about this theme though, explicitly referring to Dolto. Mathelin worked in a neonatalogy department at the Delafontaine Hospital in Saint-Denis. She describes how in such a service a psychologist is usually called in to deal with the psychological suffering of the parents, without much contact with the medical team taking care of the baby. Mathelin positioned herself explicitly as being part of the medical team, taking up a position there that put the child back at the centre, not the child's body, but the child's desire. And here she refers to Dolto, who said in a conversation with her: "You are offering the heart that is a heart the desire to live, while the doctors are forcing the heart that is a piece of meat to continue to beat" (although I suspect she said it in French)”. [2] 

The medical team, that's what it's all about, is primarily concerned with the physical well-being of the child, and follows the parameters giving information about that : blood tests, weight, and so on. But if a child needs a lot of care, they are likely to talk about the child only in those terms. Mathelet observes that many parents too are no longer used to thinking about their children in a different way, to talking about the child's smile, about its history, about how the parents experience the pregnancy... She made it her job to do that during these first sessions, so that the child, in the parents' imagination, can come back to life. She has the habit of talking to the baby, rather than about the baby, together with the parents, about himself or herself, his parents, his history, his medical problems, because the story, even if it can be dramatic, belongs to the child, and the child must be able to play his part in it.

Mathelin could work on the experience of Dolto and other child psychoanalysts; for Dolto, at the time of Bernadette, it was still all new, " n’ayant encore en psychanalyse d’enfants une modeste expérience "[3] . It is nice to read how Bernadette's mother had the desire to see her daughter treated in a different way, and therefore insisted that Dolto would do so.

[1] Ibidem, p. 135

[2] Mathelin, C. Lacanian psychotherapy with children : the broken piano. New York, Other Press, 1999, p. 169.

[3] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 135

2. The archaic mother and the mother of reality

For Bernadette, those first days of life were marked by suffering, says Dolto; the first sucking and drinking had caused her above all pain and vomiting, and had caused a great deal of fear for her parents. That threat extends itself to the presence of the mother herself, for Bernadette begins to spit compulsively when mother telephones, and when mother isn’t there, the daughter eats better. I suspect, however, that Dolto mainly because of Bernadette’s speaking could guess that there is a fixation in the oral. The girl is clearly aware of her mother's concern when she says that mummy does not want her to eat, that she wants to search her heart - and then the guenon appears, saying that mummy is naughty. A few months later, that naughty guenon wants to be eaten at the same time as the things, and Bernadette punches herself in the stomach, she wants that monkey to come out. Dolto interprets this as the guenon being an object of projection for the discomfort Bernadette felt when her parents took care of her body. [1]   

Dolto suspects that " son corps de fille est vécu par elle comme siège de zone érogene orale et tube digestif confondus avec le corps de la mère qui, partie, absentéïse son besoin et son désir de manger, mettant en danger le vivre, pourrait-on dire, somatique”.[2] In L'image inconscient du corps she describes how children who are confronted with a lot of tension in the context of feeding, if not given sufficient reassurance and language, will channel that tension into the archaic mother of the digestive tract, associated with the external mother who could not prevent the suffering.

Dolto distinguishes between the archaic mother, both in the oral and anal stages, and the real mother. The archaic mother had to deal with a memory of the vegetative life of her childhood, the threat preserved through the body (we will come back to that later), whereas the real mother, imagined in her fantasy, could offer safety for Bernadette and thus make it possible to eat.  Bernadette loved her father and mother, but their physical presence was linked to her suffering body.

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 165

[2] Ibidem, p. 136.

3. “L’enfant traduisait des émois instinctuels d’agressivité, libérés grâce à la projection dans la poupée du sentiment de culpabilité”

Dolto’s works are giving us many examples of projection, which she herself describes as the graphic staging of the partial pulses, the libido expressed in the form of energy in the imaginary scenarios that are drawn or modelled. In this way, the image of the body can be portrayed, which she defines as structured by desire and pleasure, in relation to the other(s).[1] “Le désir propre de l’enfant, qu’il soit olfactif, oral, anal, urétral (chez le garçon) ou génital (chez le garçon et la fille), ne peut pas s’exprimer directement de façon langagère autonome (…) Il ne peut l’exprimer, son désir,que par le biais de désirs partiels, à travers les projections représentées qu’il en donne”[2]. Through these drawings, the child speaks about the relationship to father or mother or other persons in the environment, in the way they live in his own psychic world. For example, the boy who, at Dolto's consultation, models a well and guides his mother's finger until she caresses the inside of the well. The well is a representation of the anal body, the boy's rectum, in relation to the mother who appeared so concerned about checking that her boy had no anal problems. But, Dolto stresses, the drawings, the modelling, can never be interpreted without the child's linguistic associations on his work.

Psychoanalytic literature often makes use of the concept of "projection", but if we are to believe Sami Ali, it has never really been founded metapsychologically. In his work De la projection he describes how Freud in his first period (1894-1913) mainly spoke about the defensive function of projection, whereas he later will also speak about a "normal" form of projection, for Sami Ali a non-defensive or non-conflictual form of projection. [3]  The first is quite well known: a man will have the desire for infidelity with regard to his wife, and at the same time be very suspicious of his wife's fidelity. His own desire for infidelity is projected onto his wife - which at the same time offers a kind of excuse for his own desire: if his wife would want it too, she is not much better than he is, is she?   Freud, however, has gradually expanded the meaning of the concept, concludes Sami Ali, whereby the projective process, prior to defence, appears as a process that helps to shape the world in order to make it a cultural universe. [4] 

For Sami Ali, non-defensive projection then becomes a primitive function of the becoming psychic apparatus, and only later is it transformed into a defence mechanism. [5]  After a lengthy discussion, he concludes that the world, in projection, appears as analogous to (a part of) the I. The projection is a spontaneous interpretative activity that he equates with the secondary elaboration of the dream, whereby from an infinity of data, those data are chosen that can serve to form that analogy. Perception, thinking and one's own body are involved in this imaginary relation to the world, whereby one's own body is engaged as an original capacity for projection, a representational scheme through which the subject, the object, space and time, and thus also the psychosomatic economy[6], are determined.  And because an image is formed in the external world, distance is created from the pulsional experience, and it is also covered. [7] A description that is very reminiscent of what Dolto says about the poupée-fleur : “le sujet qui a exprimé au bénéfice d’un autre objet des émois dont il ne se reconnaît pas consciemment responsable peut en tirer le profit de la mise à distance et de la “réflexion”.[8] Perhaps then we can say that the two functions of projection are intertwined, even though they have a different purpose.  

I suppose we could say that Dolto, in her theory on the image of the body, and in our case of Bernadette, uses the two functions of projection - the defensive function and the representational function - to explain what happened. The representational function seems to me to appear when the girl draws a tree whose trunk is straight again, and the big yellow flower, and perhaps the whole ceremonial in which she destroys the monkey.

The defensive function appears clearly when the monkey is being made a scapegoat for all Bernadette's negative feelings towards her mother, thus reducing her own feelings of guilt. Bernadette re-enacts a dialogue, speaking to her doll, bringing the doll close to her ear to hear what she answers. Dolto translates this as a dialogue between an auxiliary I or a Moi-idéal (Bernadette's mother, with whom the girl here identifies) in dialogue with the Moi coté Ýa or the frustrated pre-Moi, and in that dialogue she can forgive herself for her inappropriate emotions.  Once the "naughty", the aggression, was projected onto the doll, Dolto says, Bernadette was freed from her guilt and could explain how it was caused by her physical handicap, mixed with "l'angoisse archaïque" (I suspect that we are talking about this fear in relation to the archaic mother) and "l'angoisse primaire de castration" (we will come back to this later), frustration and insecurity.

[1] Ibidem, p. 23.

[2] Ibidem, p. 31.

[3] This distinction appears in Freud's Schreber study, where he speaks of "normal" projection and "pathological projection: “Men zou geneigd zijn dit merkwaardige proces als de essentie en als absoluut pathognomonisch voor paranoia af te schilderen, als men er niet tijdig aan werd herinnerd dat 1. de projectie niet bij alle vormen van paranoia dezelfde rol speelt, en 2. dat ze niet alleen bij paranoia, maar ook onder andere omstandigheden in het zielenleven voorkomt, dat haar zelfs een vast aandeel in onze houding tegenover de buitenwereld is toegewezen. Wanneer wij de oorzaken van bepaalde zintuiglijke gewaarwordingen niet — zoals die van andere gewaarwordingen — in onszelf zoeken maar ze naar buiten verleggen, verdient ook dit normale proces de benaming projectie.” Freud, S. Werken V (opmerkingen over een geval van paranoia [‘het geval schreber’]. Amsterdam, Boom, 2006, p. 395 - Sami Ali, De la projection. Paris, Dunod, 2004, p. 23

[4] Sami Ali, De la projection. Paris, Dunod, 2004, p. 47

[5] Ibidem, p. 148.

[6] Ibidem, p. XVII

[7] “Toute explication de la projection en termes de perceptions, quelle que soit sa coloration “dynamique”, méconnaît ce fait très simple que l’élaboration secondaire, une fois accomplie la tâche qu’elle s’est fixée, s’efface précisément derrière la réalité qu’elle a fait surgir.” Ibidem, p. 108.

[8] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 189

4. “Le type et l’évolution du transfert que l’enfant a vécu sur la poupée-fleur est très particulier. Je crois que l’objet végétal impose au sujet une attitude particulière”[1]

Dolto suspects that the doll-flower was a support for the narcissistic affect, being hurt at the oral stage, without there having been a possibility of integrating and sublimating the emotions inherent in that stage. The child had turned against itself because of the disorders of the digestive tract; it was this oral aggressiveness that projected itself onto the simultaneously human and vegetable form of the doff-flower.

She suspects that the design, a doll with a human form, but a head in the shape of a flower, without a face, allows the projection of instinctual emotions that remained fixed in the oral stage of the evolution of the libido. She talks about how children love to identify with plants, trees - as a projection of the erogenous zone of the passive oral-anal body image, place of bearing fruit of plants[2], individual and living creatures, but not animated and motorised . When that stage of love for the flowers is not realised, she says, it can lead to serious disorders in digestion, in contact with oneself.

What is the importance of this plant form? In order to understand this, I turned again to a work by Sami Ali, Corps réel, corps imaginaire[3], in which he describes how drawings can represent something of the body image and how this can be linked to somatic disorders. I will briefly go into that.

Sami Ali describes a therapy with a girl who is cross-eyed and slightly nearsighted, and who also has difficulty distinguishing left from right. The representation of space, says Sami Ali, is problematic because of the failure to acquire a frame of reference of one's own body. There is no recognition of left and right, in relation to one's own body. The author relates this to the prohibition of left-handedness, by mother and grandmother; grandmother noticed that Elisabeth was drawing with the left hand when the girl was 4 years old, and she immediately prohibited it. It is therefore no coincidence, says Sami Ali, that the first drawing of Elisabeth, in the session, is a house whose roof weighs heavily on the right-hand side of the façade[4]. The analyst was immediately put in the position of the grandmother.

He tells Elisabeth that she is afraid to show herself left-handed in front of her mother, and that she is trying to convince the latter by turning it around. At the same time he advises the mother to let Elisabeth do it, and the girl immediately asks not to have to wear her glasses anymore. 

The cure continues, Elisabeth continues to wear her glasses, there is an evolution concerning the left-right distinction, and some time later she again draws a house, much lighter and more lively, with a flower and a tree appearing to the left of the house. In that part of the room, the dominance of the left hand appears, free from any constraint. Another month later, a new drawing appears, with again a tree, touching the sky, whereby the left side becomes more and more dominant, and the house, symbolising the right hand, remains absent. On the left two flowers, on the right one flower, looking at a rabbit eating a carrot. Sami Ali says: the body projects itself freely to create an imaginary totality, free from the constraints of the rules, where the subject can recognise itself, in the most regressive elements. Elements Dolto also is speaking about : the flower as a (narcissistic) symbol for the subject, followed by the oral element, the eating rabbit.

 Mother notes that the girl is also doing better physically; she no longer vomits, as she often did at the beginning of the treatment.

Three months later Elisabeth no longer wears her glasses, except in class, to see the blackboard. She is doing very well, as evidenced by a drawing in which the house participates in the joy of living, next to a girl feeding the birds.

Sami Ali emphasises how both physical and psychological symptoms must be considered within the unity of the body, which defines it primarily as the capacity for projection. There was a fundamental difficulty for Elisabeth in structuring space through the projection of her own bodily space. What is important for us here, however, is to see how the yearning subject emerges through that representation of a flower, followed by the representation of food (the rabbit, the birds), in its relation to the analyst. The rabbit, also present with Bernadette, “un mammifère craintif et aimable, doux à caresser, sans défense et plein de charme”.[5]

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 161

[2] Dolto, F. Les étapes majeure de l’enfance. Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 353.

[3] Sami Ali, Corps réel, corps imaginaire. Paris, Dunod, 1984, p. 100

[4] Dolto gives a similar example of a drawing of a quadrangular house, with a roof in the shape of a trapezium, which, for example, refers to the child's I, with a roof on top that generally indicates a body image as a relational mediator. But she adds an interesting observation: the equivalence between "toi" (you) and "toit" (roof). The mother's speech about the child seems, as it were, to be reflected in the relational body image, in that drawing. Dolto, F. & Nasio, J.D. L’enfant du miroir. Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2002, p.

[5] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 173

5. “Ce terme de réflexion doit être entendu au sens surdéterminé d’image réflechie comme dans un miroir”[1]

Although the text seems to make very frequent use of what Dolto describes in her later work, L'image inconscient du corps, the term "body image" does not appear in it. The article "Cure psychanalytique à l'aide de la poupé-fleur" dates from 1949. Although the text seems to make use of what Dolto describes as "l'image inconsciente du corps", the concept "unconscious image of the body " does not yet appear in the article. In "Personnologie et image du corps" (1961), she speaks of the force underlying the graphic or plastic compositions of children, which she proposes to name " image of the body ": " “Le médiateur de ces présentifications, dans les représentations allégoriques, s’est montré être spécifique : c’est la référence au corps, qu’il soit directement ou indirectement impliqué dans son anecdotique existence actuelle. Ce médiateur, nous proposons donc de l’appeler l’image du corps”.[2]   In 1984, L'image inconsciente du corps is published, in which she describes how to work with this projection of emotional experience, as a kind of "psychic container".[3] But, important, the body image comes from the symbolic elaboration of the emotional relationship to the two parents, not from the sensory relationship as such.[4]

So what is this pre-Moi, where she was earlier talking about ? To know more about this, we have to go back to the distinction between the image of the body and the body-scheme.

The body scheme refers to the actual body, the immediate experience, which evolves in time and space; thus the body scheme of a child will change according to its neurological development, together with the shift of dominance of the erogenous zones: “abstraction du vécu du corps dans les trois dimensions de la réalité, se structure par l’apprentissage et l’expérience”.

The image of the body, on the other hand, is marked by the relationship to the other, the bodily experience: “l’image du corps se structure par la communication entre sujets et la trace, au jour le jour mémorisée, du jouir frustré, reprimé ou interdit”. The image of the body is an unconscious memory of the repeated archaic emotional experiences of the desiring subject, in relation to the other. Every contact with the other is supported by the image of the body. [5] It is actualised in the actual relationship, through language, clay, music, mimicry, gesture. Thus we could say that the image of the body comes close to what Sami Ali calls "the projection capacity" of the body, an imagination of the body as it is experienced in relation to the other. Or: “It is the subjective identity of the child, anchored in a body of sensations that are projected through the drawing in the immediacy of the clinical session. The child shows metaphorically where he is to the psychoanalyst.”[6]

The place of the image of the body is the body scheme, but still there is a difference. This shows itself where Dolto gives the example of the image of the body for people who are born blind. When they draw a picture, the hands of the figure are given a very dominant place, with dimensions that are much larger than with sighted children, because they actually see with their hands.  We saw an example earlier, of the boy modelling a well, where the partial anal body image was represented in the relational experience. Another example is that of the girl who during the first session draws a vase with beautiful blooming flowers, with the stems submerged in water. When her mother sits next to her, during a subsequent session, she draws a tiny flower pot with hardly any water and wilted flowers. The girl's body scheme has not changed, but the difference makes clear how the girl feels she is allowed to blossom when she is alone with the analyst, while the relationship with her mother clearly appears as disturbed. [7] 

In the meantime, we have already come across the concept pre-Moi: it arises within that relationship with the presence and the absence of the mother, in a kind of containing continuum of perceptions of that presence, and through the memorisation of what is said about it, specificly about this person in the relationship to himself.  The image of the body is a relational 'es', says Dolto, situated in a spatial body, part of which constitutes a pre-Moi of a child capable of living temporarily separated from the body of the other (we will come back to this temporary nature of this separation later).

[1] Ibidem, p. 189

[2] Ibidem, p. 73

[3] Hall, Hivernel & Morgan Theory and practice in Child Psychoanalysis. An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto. London/New York, Routledge, 2018, p. 44

[4] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 74

[5] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 23

[6] Hall, Hivernel & Morgan Theory and practice in Child Psychoanalysis. An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto. London/New York, Routledge, 2018, p. 72

[7] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 25

6. “Boules qui éclatent les maisons”[1]

Dolto speaks of three modalities of the image of the body - the basic image, the functional image, the erogenous image, which together constitute the image of the body image, held together by the dynamic image.

The basic image is what allows the child to experience a kind of spatio-temporal continuity[2], despite the changes in life, the displacements and the bodily experiences it undergoes. Dolto links this to the notion of primordial narcissism, the desire to live, the beginnings of which she traces back to foetal life or even before.

Whenever there is a violation of this basic image, Dolto says, there is immediately a phantasy or a representation that threatens life itself - dying, bursting out ... Where she speaks of disturbances or a functional disorder, which can possibly cause disorders of organs, this brings us very strongly the "impingements" in mind Winnicott was talking about, with that difference that Dolto emphasises language - there is no image if there is no language.

There is a basic image specific to each stage: from birth onwards there is first a respiratory-olfactive-auditory basic image, the basic image of air. This is followed by the oral image, which encompasses the entire oral cavity, pharynx and larynx, chest and abdomen, representing the full or empty stomach. The anal imagery adds to this the functioning of holding back or expelling the lower part of the digestive tract, and thus also the entourage of the pelvis and buttocks.

The basic image is represented at any age by houses, boats, cars, sometimes even with features of the face.[3]

The functional image is an energetic or mobile image of the subject visualizing the fulfillment of his desire, in response to a demand that can be localized in the body schema, in an erogenous place where the lack makes itself felt, a lack provoking a desire, a search for lust. Dolto gives the example of the anal functional body image: the image of an explosive emission, a relationship to the need to defecate, which may or may not be given meaning through language by the mother. But there is also the pleasure of the expulsion of the trachea, of changing sounds and the emission of sounds, with speaking and singing as an sublimation of the anality. The functional image allows an enrichment of the relational possibilities with others; for example, the hand can be at first an oral grasping erogenous zone, later a rejecting anal erogenous zone, but it has to connect with the arm into a functional image in order to give the child the freedom to reach its goal.

The erogenous image is, associated with a functional body image, the place where the erotic desire or displeasure focuses its relationship to the other. The erogenous image is represented by circles, ovals, cones, cavities, balls, tentacles … with the possibility of receiving or sending something[4].

These three components transform in relation to the experiences the subject goes through and the limitations he meets. The basic image ensures narcissistic cohesion. Thus, the functional image must allow a situation adapted to the body schema, the erogenous image opens the way to a shared lust that also has a symbolic value and can be expressed through words of the other.

Finally, there is the dynamic image, corresponding to the desire to be, always conjugated as an active verb, aimed at becoming. It is a kind of awaiting intensity, waiting for the object, the desire with a direction. It can appear in dotted lines, for example from a gun or a cannon, but also in movements of turning, graphic traces that indicate the rhythm of the subject in a state of desire. But in itself the dynamic image has no representation.

If we now think of Bernadette's drawing during the first session, the “boules” shattering the houses, Dolto's description seems to clarify something about the dynamics that are represented there, in combination with what the girl adds: the babies that break the mouth or the belly. The tension between the erogenous image and the basic image, the displeasure that is experienced, too great to preserve the continuity of being, is immediately apparent from that drawing and her comments on it. She returns to it in the next session, with the same words, but pointing to her chest: on fait éclater tout ça, c’est pour voir dans le coeur, c’est pour soigner”, and she tells how her mother is always anxious about her daughter, always wants to investigate things.

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 136

[2] Which is indeed reminiscent of Winnicott's "continuity of being". – Hall, Hivernel & Morgan Theory and practice in Child Psychoanalysis. An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto. London/New York, Routledge, 2018, p. 89

[3] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 91

[4] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 57

7. “Sa façon d’aimer est sous-tendue par une sorte d’éthique sanguinaire (peut-être foetale, vampirique, et celle du nouveau-né, cannibale”[1]

Dolto speaks of foetal life as the "vampiric period" and of the “éthique, celle du foetus”[2], which enjoys the increasing of the bodily mass, the ethic of gathering, of taking – just like the foetus taking the blood of the placenta. This period comes to an end when the child is born, what Dolto calls the umbilical castration.

The initial image of the body has its origin in the foetal perceptions, the rhythm, the warmth, the sound, the double beating of the heart. The sounds are perceived through a wall of fluid and flesh in which the sounds of activity are muffled. The cutting of the umbilical cord cuts the child off from the placenta and the envelopes through which it was enveloped in the womb, which was part of its own organism. There is now a sudden variation in those perceptions: a different rhythm of the heart, the sensation of the mass of the body, the perception of the hands caring for the child. The child discovers sensations of which it had no awareness until now: light, smell, tactile sensations, pressure, gravity and strong and clear sounds. The child has to breathe, the peristalsis of the digestive system is activated. There is the light that blinds the eyes, the presence of other people. Birth, as the initial mutation of life, marks a style of fear that can be unconsciously remembered, like a natural disaster, with an initial introductory experience of suffocation.

The most striking sound is that of the first name and the signification of gender, at birth, accompanied by the joy or reluctance of those who speak of the child. That first linguistic signification of narcissistic joy or of fear is retained in the unconscious as a kind of "recording". The fear or joy, within that relationship between parents and child, will mark the psychism of the subject.[3]

This first castration is foundational, says Dolto; the modalities of birth will serve as a matrix for the modality of subsequent castrations; whenever there is an important change in existence, it will happen the same way as birth. She refers to the mothers who had noticed this themselves: whenever their children faced a difficulty in life, they behaved in the same way as they had dealt with that transition from foetal life to the life of an infant. Hence Dolto suspects that the people who dealt with the twists and turns in their lives in a relatively calm manner, may also have had a relatively easy birth, without much injury, without much pain. [4]

It may seem incredible that something of the birth remains in the memory, and yet clinical experience shows how often something is relived of what happened then, and how speaking can have an effect on this. Dolto himself tells us the story of a woman who ended up in a coma after the birth of her son, without there being any problem. In fact, she was reliving her mother's experiences during childbirth. The mother did not want to see her, after which mother and child were separated. The girl was brought up by a governess, with the story that mother had tuberculosis and had left for Switzerland. When the child had become a woman and had to give birth, she became, like her mother, "psychically dead" without knowing what was going on. Her husband only then heard the whole story about her birth, and Dolto advised him to speak about it to his wife. When he did, she woke up from her coma, saying "I think I know why I didn't have the right to have a daughter"[5]. The woman then recovered completely.

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 173

[2] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p 50

[3] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 91 -93

[4] Dolto, F. La cause des enfants. Paris, Ed. Robert Laffont, 1985, p. 264-265.

[5] “Je crois que je sais pourquoi je n’avais pas le droit d’avoir une fille”. Ibidem, p. 111.

8. “Cest le déblocage de la liberté d’expression orale laryngo-pharingienne : bruitage, puis parole ; enfin, l’expression verbale parfaite”[1]

One of the first things changing, after the introduction of the doll-flower, is the way Bernadette speaks, which is no coincidence for Dolto. She refers to this further on in her review, for this occurs not only with Bernadette, but also with Nicole or Monique, other case studies in the book. In order to understand how Dolto sees this connection, we need to go into her theory of oral castration.

In L'image inconscient du corps, Dolto describes how oral castration - weaning, if done properly - leads to the desire and the ability to speak[2] . The oral base image includes the entire mouth zone, the pharynx and the larynx. The baby initially experiences pleasure through breastfeeding, but gradually he or she may also experience pleasure through bringing objects to his mouth, and the mother will often name these objects. Gradually, when the baby wakes up alone in his cot, he will babble, but also play with the sounds and search to imitate the mother's speaking, as a kind of internal voice. The mouth inherits the manual skills, says Dolto, and although there is obviously a long way to go, those first sounds are, for the parents and the environment, a sign of feelings, sensations and desires that the child is communicating to them. For the baby, those sounds, the beginning of words, can make him or her remember the mother. Thus, language becomes a symbol of the initial bodily relationship with the mother, through the subtle vocalisation and attribution of meaning with words that recall those earlier sensory experiences. The symboligenous castration, as she calls it, thus brings the child to language and to the possibility of communicating with others.

What we hear from Bernadette is anything but a history in which feeding and weaning, and thus oral castration, went smoothly.

Dolto thinks the doll-flower provided the opportunity to liberate the tender-sadistic emotions inherent in the cannibalistic ethic of the oral age, and for the recuperation of narcissism, without fear. Further on, she speaks of a cannibalistic desire, expressed by the hand of Bernadette. What does “éthique cannibale de l’âge oral”[3] mean ?

When a baby is being breastfed, she says, it happens of course for the satisfaction of the need for nourishment, but at the same time the child also experiences an erotic satisfaction, which she calls "pseudo-cannibalistic”. The child drinks the milk, but "eats the mummy" through an imaginary cannibalistic lust. This can later on be transferred to the child's own body, when the baby sucks its thumb or its fist, in the illusion that it can suck on the mother’s breast. Oral castration is therefore a renunciation of the illusion of cannibalism, of the mother's breast as a partial object.

These archaic experiences remain in the body, she says, and have their repercussions at the psychosomatic level. That is why fierce arguments in the family can cause an outbreak of gastric ulcers for a stomach patient. This is clear in the psychoanalysis of stomach patients, when the analysand relives the time when he was breastfed. [4] The dreamlike representations that appear in the analysis obey a cannibalistic ethic of motherly love, eating kisses, and emotional concerns return to the stomach, when it comes to the relationship with people with whom we share our meals. [5]

How should we think about that, a memory preserved in the body? I think we can find some clues for this in a well-known case study from last century, about a 15-month-old girl born with a congenital oesophageal blockage. Monica had an oesophagus that was formed with a dead end, and could only be fed through a surgically constructed opening to the stomach, not through the mouth, although she could take food in the mouth which then left the body through an opening in her neck. Due to a difficult home situation and the risk of malnutrition and depression, the girl was hospitalised for months. She could neither sit nor speak, her development was delayed. In this context, there was the possibility for an intensive study on the relationship between the production of gastric juices (which promote the digestion of food) and situational factors, especially her reactions to the proximity of her carers. The doctors observed that when Monica met strangers, or when she exhibited depressive behaviour, she reacted with loss of muscle tone and changes in her stomach. Also when medication was administered, the production of gastric juices appeared different depending on the situation. IN the presence of her favourite caregiver, this secretion increased and Monica was better able to absorb nutrition. The researcher, Engel, concludes: These data suggest that in this infant, at the level of the development at which she was studied, the processes whereby relationships with objects in the external world are established, include a general intaking, assimilative organisation in which the stomach participates as if the intention is also to take objects into it. In other words, along with other behavioral activities, such as reaching, touching, grasping, looking, hitting, pushing, kicking, all of which take very active cognitance of the object in the environment, the stomach also behaves as though preparing for food, as if that which is in the external world is literally to be ingested and digested.” In other words, when it is given food, the stomach not only prepares for the digestion of food but also, in conjunction with other reactions - touching, looking, hitting, stomping, for the contact with an object, and it behaves as if it wants to ingest that object.[6] Suddenly the term "incorporation as a precursor of identification"[7] takes on a very specific meaning. And important : the contact with the caregivers seems to be very important for the activity of the digestive processes, the presence of the other person has an effect on the digestion. 

Now we can understand how Bernadette’s painful experiences during that period of her life remained fixed in her body. The girl herself bears witness to this when she speaks of the guenon that wants to come into her when she eats, to make her a guenon too - describing, as it were, how there was,  with the food, also an introjection of the frightening emotions that her mother had to experience during that period. Dolto indeed supposes two situations of fixation of the oral libido; (1) this fixation has its origin in the emotions effectively experienced by the child during the oral period of development, or (2) the repression of the libido in a later period led to a regression of an oral nature, which can take different forms: motor inhibition, character inhibition, psychosomatic, a blocked expression of phantasies and emotions associated with the pre-oedipal stage. [8]

Dolto assumes that Bernadette's oral narcissism could be recovered through the treatment with the doll-flower. Especially her statement about “être méchante pour elle, ça s’appelle être gentille, parce que qu’elle a un bras et une jambe qui ne marchent pas”[9]  clarified things for Dolto. Before that, however, Bernadette had expressed her feeltings through the projection on the "naughty" doll-flower, without feeling guilty about it. The drives that used to be fixed in the oral stage of the development of the libido had now been castrated and could be symbolised. The girl could evolve towards the expression of the emotions of the anal stage. [10] Moreover, the spectacular clumsiness in the movements, the lack of coordination, disappeared. The organic weakness remained, but Bernadette dealt with that handicap in a different way.

[1] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p.169

[2] “Cette castration (sevrage), lorsqu’elle est judicieusement donné, aboutit au désir et à la possibilité de parler, et donc à la découverte de nouveaux moyens de communication, dans des plaisirs différents, avec des objets dont l’incorporation n’est pas ou plus possible.”

Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 99.

[3] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 171

[4] McDougall elaborates on this in her cases of Isaac and (Jean) Paul; excerpts from this analysis are discussed in Théatres du Je, Theaters of the mind, The many faces of Eros, Theatre of the body.

[5] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 361

[6] Engel, G.L., Reichsman, F. & Segal, H.L. A study of an infant with a gastric fistula. In : Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol. XVIII, 5, 1956, pp. 374-398.

[7] Een eerste pregenitale seksuele organisatie is de orale of, zo men wil, kannibaalse. Hier is de seksuele activiteit nog niet gescheiden van de voedselopname en zijn nog geen innerlijke tegenstellingen gedifferentieerd. Beide activiteiten betreffen hetzelfde object, het seksuele doel is de incorporatie van het object, het model van wat later als identificatie een zo belangrijke psychische rol zal gaan spelen. Als restant van deze fictieve, ons door de pathologie opgedrongen organisatiefase kan men het sabbelen beschouwen, waarbij de seksuele activiteit, losgemaakt van het voeden, het vreemde object heeft ingeruild voor een object aan het eigen lichaam.

Freud, S. Werken Iv (Drie verhandelingen over de theorie van de seksualiteit). Amsterdam, Boom, 2006, p. 76.

[8] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 189

[9] Ibidem, p. 140.

[10] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 172

9. Nous assistons ensuite, à la faveur de l’effacement du Surmoi, à la conquête de l’expression libre de celles des intentions motrices qui étaient jugées mauvaises par le Moi[1]

Dolto sees the same evolution in Bernadette's as well in another case: at first there is a very positive reaction to the doll-flower, but after a while she becomes the scapegoat, prise comme bouc émissaire responsable mais non coupable des pulsions inadaptées de l’enfant”. The externalisation of the anal drives took on a verbal form, “traduction grossière, scatologique, de fantasmes délinquants, délirants et obsessionnels”[2].

The unacceptable drives, she says, were projected onto an animal figure that was then sacrificed as a scapegoat. There was a dissociation of the instinctive emotions, evident in the contrast between her disabled hand expressing love by biting down to blood, and the right hand making tender movements - an internal ambivalence she couldn’t handle before. Dolto suspects that the wolf girl, previously situated within that cannibalistic ethic of the oral phase, was also sacrificed as a scapegoat for anal-motor guilt and for oedipal genital pulsations, just as the guenon was. [3]

Why does Dolto speak of anal-motor guilt?

When the baby is breast-fed, she says, the milk is swallowed, digested and expelled, and the stool seems to the child to be something that must be appreciated by the mother, because she walks away with it every time, doesn't she? As the child grows older, it gains control of the anal sphincter and can play with holding or releasing the stool, at the same time as it can use the rest of its muscles in a more controlled way. In the shift from the oral to the anal erogenous zone, the hands become central instead of the mouth: babies grab objects, tear them up with great joy, a destructiveness that necessarily comes first, before more constructive and edifying actions are possible. Hence anal castration, for Dolto, has to do with a child that develops more and more motoric skills and thus becomes more and more independent of the mother, what eventually will lead to activity, to doing. That is why she stresses the importance of respecting the child's own pace for the development of potty training, and that parents should preferably focus on the appreciation of motor and physical motricity and not on the contents of the nappies or the potty. [4] Moreover, all this must be accompanied by words that specify the different parts of the body, the sensorial exploration of the body, one's own behaviour, the behaviour of others. Dolto draws attention to an important difference with the oral phase: speaking and eating cannot take place at the same time, but speaking and defecating can.

But there is also the related prohibition - about inflicting damage, about vandalism - where again it is very important that the child is not "trained" like a pet, but given words to understand why it should not be allowed to perform some of these newly-acquired actions. Dolto therefore speaks of motor castration: the child may not harm his own body or that of the other, nor the objects in which the other has invested as his property[5].  But if a child does come to aggression, it needs not only words that continue to respect that prohibition, but also words that respect the child's intention that led to such an act. For if there is no symbolisation of that motricity, through lack of initiation, control, words and playfulness in the environment, the child will return to that original way of communicating with the mother, the game of defecation, constipation, diarrhoea.

Now we can go back to Bernadette, who projects her behaviour towards the environment onto the doll-flower : it is the doll-flower that strikes, not Bernadette, and thus the girl is freed from her "naughtiness", from her guilt, and she can freely express the “bad” motor intensions, condemned by the I. She can speak about the sadistic love of her left hand, "her way of loving", and about the connection between her physical handicap and her difficulties to adapt herself to society.

Bernadette finds a solution to this ambivalence - her naughtiness and her tenderness - by projecting her "naughtiness", the spitefulness, the quarrelsomeness, the despotism, onto the wolf girl and the guenon, where we find the same ambivalence as with the two hands. The girl is sadistic out of good intentions. The guenon loves Bernadette and therefore wants to come into her, but at the same time he is supportive of her aggressive emotions towards her mother.[6] The guenon served as an object of projection for the discomfort in caring for her body, in that first period of her life, both in the oral sphere (the difficult feeding) and in the anal sphere (blood in the nappies). Once those negative feelings were projected onto the guenon, Bernadette could, with a sadistic anal aggressiveness, fight against the oedipal emotions (the man who has a stick and gave her bad ideas), the memory of her frightened mother, the frustration about the motor handicap.

Dolto thinks that Bernadette’s ritual allowed for the projection of emotions and the frightening guilt of the anal stage, because the aggressiveness associated with the frustrations of her disability could be projected onto the guenon.

[1] Ibidem, p. 162

[2] Ibidem, p. 169.

[3] Ibidem, p. 173.

[4] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 124.

[5] Ibidem, p. 113

[6] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 164.

10. “Le visage de ce qu’il ressent, c’est celui de sa mère”[1]

The face of what the infant feels is the face of the mother ? Here too, Sami Ali comes to our aid.[2]   The face, he says, can be touched but not seen, only in front of a mirror. So the face is something of the outside world, on the level of the body image it is a void, first of all there is a baby who has no face. Secondly, the only face the baby has is the mother's face, which coincides with the visual field in that initial period. There is no possibility yet of creating distance between subject and object; the other is at the same time subject and object, the subject can construct itself as another in relation to itself.

I suspect that we can link this to the findings of developmental psychologists, who point to the affective communication system between mother and child, where mothers match their facial expression to the emotional expression of the children.[3] Whereas the baby's internal sensations, being in an emotional state, are initially not consciously perceived as belonging to that emotion, the mirroring by the mother results in a gradual awareness of that emotion in the child. But in fact the child learns about his own emotion through its reflection on the mother's face, reacting as if it were his own face. That “as if” is important, because usually there is a kind of "marked" emotional expression, the mother will, for example,  exaggerate the reflection of the emotion, which then contrasts with the facial expression that belongs to the emotion of the mother herself.

Thirdly, says Sami Ali, there comes the perception of the face of the other as being other, with the anticipation of having a face of its own that is different from that of the mother. The difference introduces the distance, but also the fear, of the distance from the other and from oneself.[4] Finally, the mirror image confirms the otherness, through a coordination of tactile and kinaesthetic sensations with the visual appearance, the subject seems to coincide with itself, while in reality there is more of a break with one's own sensations.

Like Sami Ali and many other authors, Dolto emphasizes the effects of the mirror image; in L'image inconscient du corps she elaborates on the mirror experience, which for her is about much more than the confrontation with the mirror image itself.

Dolto, however, speaks of the unconscious body image that exists before the mirror image, moreover, it disappears with the mirror image, it continues to exist only in the dream, and it manifests itself in psychosomatic disorders, in psychotics and in comatose patients.[5]  Yet she deliberately chooses the term "image", because it is an image of the place where the subject experiences his body, for example where it hurts. Before the child can recognise itself in the mirror, it can feel itself in sensory and linguistic experiences in relation to the other, and there too she stresses the importance of the presence and absence of the other.[6] If the other is not there, the child can fill this absence by phantasies, but not for too long.  A phantasy, for Dolto, refers to the unconscious body image, being the living synthesis of the emotional experiences connected to the subject, the history of the subject, articulated into the language of the relational and sensorial experience of the child.

Dolto gives the example of girl of 2,5 years who was separated from her mother for two months. There was someone else who cared for her, but she could not totally replace the mother, because until then the mother had always been present at meals and had never been away for more than a day. The child fell into a state of apathy, and the attending physician - who had read an article by Dolto - thought of giving the child the mother's underwear and petticoats. The child reacted in an incredible way, immediately putting that linen all over her body, against her body. After a few hours, she put the linen on the floor, played with it, and once the meal hour had come, she wrapped herself in it again. Dolto concludes that the absent "image" of the mother had deprived this child of any desire for self-preservation, which was restored because the mother's laundry could serve as a mediation for the absent contact between the child's skin and the mother's skin.

She describes in a similar way the influence of another person being present in the case of a child who, as a result of an injury, can no longer use his hand: after a short time, this hand no longer exists for the child, and when the bandage is removed after a few days, the child needs the mother's encouragement to find the pre-existing relationship with this hand again, to reintegrate this hand into the motor circuit, feeling it as part of him. Indeed, for several days, the child did not feel the need to have that hand as part of him, because he continued to exist, even without that hand. [7] 

Unlike other authors, Dolto will emphasise how the other above all must be present in language. The child knows himself, his perceptions, through the speech of the other, and it is important that this speech is heard again regularly. Thus a body image arises as a kind of network of linguistic safety with the other. But there is no individuation, for the spatial boundaries of the linguistic perceptions are blurred. The only image the child has is the image of the other with whom it is communicating.

Hence Dolto can say about the doll-flower that it can be a kind of mirror, but not only for the visible, also for the audible, the sensible, the intentional, it is not the mirror image that is reflected there, but the relational function, “le miroir de l’être du sujet dans l’autre”. [8] The doll reflects the child's sense of self, in relation to the mother's reactions to the baby, in that specific period of her life - reactions charged with fear.

But what happens during that mirror experience? The child is confronted with a scopic experience, an image, which has to superimpose itself on those other sensory experiences. The child feels as being the cause of that image in the mirror, but it is only a cold surface, and the image disappears when the child disappears. It will speak to that image in the mirror, but it is clear that he does not recognise himself, because he speaks as if the image were another baby, he calls out "baby!", while he already can use the sounds of his first name. The desire for communication is frustrated, because the child in the mirror does not answer.

Dolto therefore emphasises the importance of another person being present at the mirror experience. Thus, the child experiences, by seeing the image of the other in the mirror, that the other also corresponds to those strange conditions of reflection on that flat and cold mirror surface. She speaks of a symbolic lack, a castration, a hurt, a lack of being, in that mirror experience, there is that disruptive scopic relationship, a living mask for what the subject feels, with that distance between the mirror and what the child feels. After all, the mirror image shows only one side of the body, while the child feels in his whole body, belly and backside. And yet the mirror image will have so much influence that it is the front and the scopic that will determine our experience. Dolto sketches here the difference between the facial expression of the blind born and people who can see : blind people will never disguise what they feel, she says, one reads on their faces what they experience in contact with others. Because they cannot see their face in the mirror, they do not know what others can see, and they do not hide their feelings. People who can see, have had the mirror experience,

However, if a mother or a trusted person stands next to the child, the child can see that the other person also has a body image, and then that scopic image of himself can be accepted as his own image. The mirror image immediately allows the motor integration of the own body, even if there was already an experience of cohesion before, thanks to the visceral references, the peristalsis of the digestion, the path from feeding to defecation that forms a continuum, delimited by the skin, delimited by the tactile sensations in the maternal care (whereby she speaks here of the fundamental or primordial narcissism of the infant). After the mirror experience, the child can appropriate his own body and absorb his narcissism in it (the primary narcissism).

Hence, perhaps, Dolto can say that a child who has seen himself in the mirror is supported not to project himself into the doll-flower, but only to project the archaic sense into it.

Face and identity of the child belong together after the mirror experience, and the mirror shows much more: the child's own body as a small mass, next to the large mass of the adult's body - which was not so clear before. The child will no longer confuse himself with the other, nor with those narcissistic fantasies that made him imagine himself as he wanted to be: with inanimate objects (a bus, a train), with animals (a horse, a bird) ... From now on, the conditional mode appears in these imaginary games: "if I were an aeroplane". The child will show more interest in the nudity of other children whom he knows to be like him, and will be attentive to the gender difference (primary castration). The mirror experience is the bridge between the anal castration and the following oedipal castration.

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 161

[2] Sami Ali grounded his theory on his analytical experience with psychosis and with children with psychomotor deficits, and more generally on therapy with children and adults.

[3] Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target. Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. London, Karnac, 2004, p. 157-161

[4] Sami Ali, Corps réel et corps imaginaire. Paris, Dunod, 1984, p. 121 e.v..

[5] Dolto, F. & Nasio, J.D. L’enfant du miroir. Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2002, p.13.

[6] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p.

[7] Dolto, F. & Nasio, J.D. L’enfant du miroir. Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2002, p. 40 e.v.

[8] Ibidem, p. 58.

11. “Angoisse de castration, liée au complexe d’Oedipe” [1]

One sees clearly that Bernadette already knows something about the difference between boys and girls when she uses her modelling clay to make "pipis", little balls, which she places on her body: “Un près du pipi, deux près du coeur (en me montrant les deux mamelons sous ses vêtements). Je les aime beaucoup, mes pipis, et eux ils m’aiment beaucoup aussi.”[2]

Around the age of 30 months, children have completed the mirror experience, they have observed all bodily regions, and they notice the difference between the male and female form of the front of the pelvis. They had previously noticed that women had breasts and men did not, and then when talking about what boys have, the sex of the boys is seen as a protrusion, just like those other protrusions in the women. Moreover, often the same word is used. For the children, the discovery of the gender difference is a shock, they react to the difference. Boys think that the girls also have a penis, hidden, and girls are immediately delighted by what they see in the boys, they want that too! Children ask questions, when they are allowed to talk about the body, but often they get answers in functional terms, obscuring the questioning about the lust the child experiences. The erection, independent of urination, with no functional purpose, becomes a problem for the body, for he alone cannot decipher the meaning of what he is experiencing there. For girls, the difference between urination and the pleasure of the sensations of clitoris and vagina is already experienced, but because no organs are seen, it is more difficult to talk about it. The children expect that the parents will be able to say something about it.

In the meantime, the children have already gone through a whole evolution, with the speaking of the parents imparting a system of values, things that are allowed and things that are not, the good and the bad, but in the meantime, the child continues to look for the lust, which is the goal of the desire. Children feel that there is something mysterious there, around the sex difference, around the lust of the erogenous region, about which parents answer uncomfortably, because this goes back to something very intimate for them. The parents' embarrassment makes the child assume that the other person's sex, which is different, has something to do with that attitude of the parents. Did they want that? Did they cut something off?

Dolto talks about primary castration, the discovery, by the child, of the fact that it only belongs to one gender, and what that means for the future. In most cases, both penis and breast are seen as something beautiful. The girl can live with the fact that she does not have a penis, because in the meantime she has discovered the clitoris, which also gives a lot of satisfaction, and which perhaps will grow into a penis. Moreover, she has heard that her mother and other women are satisfied with it, and that this is a condition for having babies. Hence the question of when she would have breasts to feed those babies? Thus, the girl's unconscious body image is reinforced, and she can accept uro-anal castration, the renunciation of erotic lust with the object of defecation.

Bernadette identifies herself as a woman and a mother, giving her doll-flower a maiden's name, and later on behaving in a very motherly way with her plush bear: he mustn't get too hot, so she takes his coat off of him, puts him on the couch ... [3] The guenon on which she projects her aggression also clearly has breasts. But the discovery of the gender difference, Dolto thinks, came for Bernadette as a reminder of the former inferiority of her body in relation to her father. Dolto suspects that that guenon functioned as a scapegoat for the terrifying feelings of guilt associated with Bernadette's sexual pulsations, confusingly felt in that anal-urethral-genital area.

Children are very sensitive to the way in which adults, without naming it explicitly, talk about the conception and at the same time refer to the mutual love, the own lust, the lack of lust. If this is not talked about, then the children will depict the sexual act as highly functional, operational: two children means that the parents did it twice. And they will not, as they grow up, be able to understand the feelings and desires they experience in their bodies. 

The ritual of the lynching of the guenon, organised by Bernadette in such a way that the real world (her parents, caretaker) and the phantasmatic world (the toys, the animals, the dolls) were all spectators to this execution, had as a result that the girl could abandon her aggressive behaviour and adapt herself to the rules of society, says Dolto. She names it a coitus, but then experienced as an anal sexual phantasy, where the motor sexuality is still mainly about who is the strongest and who is the weakest. [4] Hence for Dolto the importance of the father's reaction, who decided to break the fetish of evil and thus allow his daughter to destroy that negative anal part in her, after which a “Surmoi unifiant, fragile mais sain”, c’est à dire adapté aux exigences du Moi ainsi qu’à celles d’un Moi Ideal pré-oedipien encore, mais déjà génital et feminin” [5] could appear. At first Bernadette had to accept herself, through the projection on the doll-flower ; the acceptance of the social reality happened through the destruction of the little brown guenon.

Father seems to be situated here in his function as representative of the law of respect and non-aggression within the sexual relationship, which is especially important for the boy. The father's speaking, says Dolto, should make clear to the children and especially to the boy the difference between the uretro-anal desire to take possession of the other's body versus the responsibility of becoming a father. It is also important for children to hear that it takes a father to conceive a child, to talk about parentage, the social kinship, the naming by a family name, related to the affective relationships. This goes together with the oedipal castration: mother and sisters are forbidden to the boy, just as father was not allowed to marry his mother or his aunts. The child learns the difference between the fertile rut of the animals, and the human genital drive associated with love and commitment.

For the girl, there is the desire to identify with the mother, so that she would have the same privileges as the mother, granted by the father. The girl enters the Oedipus when she tries to seduce her father, which will develop her feminine qualities that she can use for this purpose: domestic, school, social. Daddy will see that she can understand him best, that she can be his best partner. Or she will try to make him jealous. The father and the brothers are of important value to the girl, and she likes to please them.

Bernadette had a difficult time with these oedipal desires, expressed through anal aggression (“C’est à cause d’un homme qui avait un bâton et qui lui a donné de mauvaises idées”)[6]. The ritual of the lynching of the guenon allowed Bernadette to abandon her aggressive behaviour and to adapt to the rules of society, says Dolto. At first, she had to accept herself, through the projection on the poupée-fleur ; the acceptance of social reality happened through the destruction of the little brown guenon.

The prohibition of incest leads the child to the desire to play in the classroom, to make friends with children of the same sex, who have experienced the same ordeal in relation to their parents. The prohibition of the realisation of sexual desire in the family is a liberation for the child, because it has to go and find it in order to realise that desire outside the family environment. Once this structuring stage of the last of the castrations is crossed, the children arrive at a relation to themselves that Dolto calls secondary narcissism. From now on, the child is responsible for his behaviour and must renounce the desire for his own parents. Oedipal castration often occurs in the period when children lose their teeth, hence the loss of teeth in adult dreams is a common representation of the fear of castration. [7]

[1] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 161

[2] Ibidem, p. 143

[3] Ibidem, p. 141

[4] What she describes when she talks about the boy: “que le garçon saisit la différence entre son désir urétro-anal de se rendre maître du corps de l’autre, de le percuter agressivement pour se sentir viril (…) et le fait de donner un jour la vie” in  : Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 189. And :
“Si, au contraire, vous avez permis à l’enfant, à l’age de deux à quatre ans, de staisfaire son agressivité dans des jeux divers et même en jouant avec des animaux, il n’y aure pas d’histoires sexuelles dans l’avenir, parce qu’il aura vécu à plein, jusque dans l’épreuve (les réactions de défense des animaux qui l’obligent à des limites) la sexualité motrice de celui qui est le plus fort sur le plus faible.” In : Dolto, F. Les étapes majeures de l’enfance. Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 365

[5] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 166

[6] Dolto, F. Au jeu du désir. Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 140

[7] Dolto, F. L’image inconscient du corps. Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 204