Françoise Dolto-Marette

French psychoanalyst (1908-1988), one of the cardinal figures of post-Freudian French child psychoanalysis. For the wiki, Dolto's relevance is focused: Merleau-Ponty cites her 1947 paper "La dynamique des pulsions et les réactions dites de jalousie à la naissance d'un puiné" (the dynamics of drives and the so-called jealousy reactions at the birth of a younger sibling) as the empirical anchor for the sibling-birth-and-temporal-restructuring analysis in PbP [62(13)]. The cited paper appears in Psyché nos. 7, 9, and 10 (1947), and is reissued in revised form in Au jeu du désir. Essais cliniques (Seuil, 1981), pp. 96-132.

Role in argument

The empirical claim Dolto-Marette provides is that the arrival of a sibling reconfigures the older child's temporal scheme. PbP [62(13)] glosses: "acquisition schème passé-présent-futur" (acquisition of the past-present-future scheme). The older child, displaced from its relational position, experiences time differently — past, present, and future as articulated temporal positions emerge with the relational displacement.

For MP, this empirical observation supports a phenomenological-existential thesis: language acquisition is not a cognitive achievement but a global restructuration of the prelinguistic field, mediated by affective-relational position. The sibling-birth analysis joins the Helen Keller analysis and the Goldstein-Schneider analysis to triangulate the same thesis from three different empirical fields.

The Dolto contribution is specific but cardinal: temporal articulation is not a pre-given structure that the child learns; it is an emergent product of relational reconfiguration. The wiki's passivity and merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity pages should be informed by this Dolto-anchor — passivity in MP's 1954-55 sense is deeply tied to relational-affective passivity, and Dolto provides the empirical case.

Connections

• cited in merleau-ponty-2020-probleme-de-la-parole Part I §I "L'acquisition de la parole" — PbP [62(13)]; acquisition schème passé-présent-futur via sibling-birth.
• also cited in merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy — the Sorbonne lectures' first MP commentary on Dolto's child-psychoanalysis work.
• part of the French post-Freudian psychoanalytic tradition MP engages, along with Jacques Lacan and Daniel Lagache.
• empirical anchor for the temporal-restructuring register of language acquisition in the wiki's speaking-spoken-speech, passivity, and innere-sprachform pages.

Sources

• merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy — Dolto is one of the French psychoanalytic sources of the Sorbonne lectures' analyses of child development.
• merleau-ponty-2020-probleme-de-la-parole — PbP [62(13)] cites the 1947 paper for the sibling-birth analysis.

External:

• Dolto-Marette, F. (1947) "La dynamique des pulsions et les réactions dites de jalousie à la naissance d'un puiné." Psyché nos. 7, 9, 10.
• Dolto, F. (1981) Au jeu du désir. Essais cliniques. Paris: Seuil, pp. 96-132. — the revised reissue.