When Françoise Marette, the young analyst in control with Sophie Morgenstern, was working in the Bretonneau hospital under Dr.Édouard Pichon, she determined that she wanted to "heal with psychoanalysis." And it worked. Symptoms disappeared, and family equilibrium was restored. It seemed as simple as that. If all pediatricians and general practitioners could benefit from this experience it would be a great day for medicine. She wished to direct the attention of her fellow physicians to the possible benefits of analysis to the patients who came to consult for a variety of ailments. Her thesis was addressed to her colleagues and presented in 1939.
Before recounting her beautiful stories, Marette felt the need in the first part of her work to define for her lay audience some analytic concepts: instinct, castration complex, agencies of the personality, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, repression, resistance, transference—but this teaches us nothing: the essence is in the struggle between the agencies, the flow of libidinal energy. Human beings were not defined as speaking beings but as storehouses of libido. The author informs us that her first three chapters are theoretical in nature, such that some readers might prefer to go directly to the second "distinctly more concrete and clinical" part.
The first chapter, "Évolution des instincts," clearly shows that we can describe the behavior and thinking of young children with reference to the breast, excreta, the penis, and without any reference to the father; only the mother is named. The father only appears when the mother goes away "to do the housework, to keep dad happy." Finally, "the child abandoned by the mother" comes to realize that it is not the only center of its mother's attention: there is a rival in the form of the father, when there are not extra rivals in the form of brothers and sisters. As is clear in the work of the first child psychoanalysts (Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, among others), the remarkably absent father plays only a late role, toward the age of four or five, and "is part of the ambience of the mother." Analytical theory introduces the father only in a context of oedipal rivalry, when the boy plays the despot, "donning his father's hat." In the beginning the child and the mother are one in the child's experience; for many analysts, they are one and the same flesh.
Marrete's work contains original suggestions. She brings forth the notion of progressive weaning, at the age of four or five months, to be completed by the seventh or eighth at the latest. If too late, she warns, weaning is experienced as "punishment for oral aggression," an assertion that received legitimate criticism. Françoise Marette was more cautious when it came to educating the sphincter. Whereas many analysts claimed that children should receive potty training at the end of the first year, she waged war against abusive sphincter training: not before twenty-four months. In this she was innovative. Equally with regard to the discovery of sexual differences and the pleasure of masturbation.
The role of the father was also a problem when it came to the Oedipus complex and the castration complex. When her work was presented in 1962, mention was made of the fact that she had married Dr. Boris Dolto in 1942. When she became a mother she acquired "experience that made her one of the representative personalities of the contemporary French psychoanalytic movement."
The second part of her thesis gives us a sense of this: in clinical vignettes and moving stories extolling the merits of psychoanalysis, sixteen children came to see her accompanied by their parents. She initially received the family all together, and then the parents withdrew to the waiting room. The children were then free to express themselves, to draw and use clay, to play and speak. But she did not see the parents again at the end of the session with the child. Some analysts and institutions immediately separate parents and children, which deprives the analyst of significant information that is indispensable for an understanding of what the child is experiencing and thus prevents the analyst from having an effective contact with the parents.
Through her account of these consultations, generations of physicians gained an increased understanding of the emotional lives of children and discovered that they had an educational role to play, whether they liked it or not. Marette, inventively, invited the children to use speech and play in order to free themselves from regressive or aggressive and poorly-adapted behavior. It is a pleasure to witness the children, determined workers, undertaking an analytic cure and inviting their parents to question the influences that condition them, all without their realizing it.
Attentive readers also discover the path that analysts must follow if they don't want to become obstacles in the way of the analysis. The thesis concludes with: "The castration complex is ineluctable in the course of human development [. . .]. This work has not enabled us to deal with the very many questions relating to the castration complex. Its aim is to interest our non-psychoanalyst colleagues in the fundamental importance of the Oedipal stage in the history of individual development and its role in the etiology of functional symptoms and behavioral disorders in order to demonstrate the therapeutic interest of psychoanalysis."
Source Citation
Marette (Dolto), Françoise. (1940). Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie. Le complexe de castration.Étude générale. Cas cliniques. Préf.Édouard Pichon, Paris:Éd. A. Legrand; Dolto, Françoise. Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie. Paris: Le Seuil, coll. "Points" 1971.
—BERNARD THIS
