Description
Book SynopsisRethinking Autism with Dolto takes up a principal legacy of Françoise Dolto's immense projecther conviction that autism is a regression to the archaic.
Dolto theorizes that the infant in utero, deep in dreams, is receptive to the audition of phonemes during the pre-conscious archaic stage of psychosexual maturation. That dream-work on wordsan idiosyncratic prehistory at the onset of mental and emotional lifesecures the unconscious circulation of affect and the ontogeny of thought long prior to speech, seeding associative thinking and facilitating self-regulation. Kathleen Saint-Onge uses the written work of four nonverbal autistic authors in seeking corroboration for Dolto's formulations, finding thoughtful self-reflections that relate the experience of living in silence with relentless anxiety while relying on regression as a defence. Dolto's unprecedented insights into the infant's earliest learning carry formidable implications for autism interventions, and fo
