Rethinking Autism with Dolto

Rethinking Autism with Dolto takes up a principal legacy of Françoise Dolto’s immense project—her 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 words—an idiosyncratic prehistory at the onset of mental and emotional life—secures the unconscious circulation of affect and the ontogeny of thought long pr