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 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 for primary language and literacy. At issue is an enduring susceptibility to archaic echoes-the haphazard securing return of pre-invested phonemes-in communicative exchanges including reading and writing. Rethinking Autism with Dolto considers unconscious processes as inherently reparative heralding the responsibility education holds for human health and supports a rethinking of autism that presumes competence. Readers are invited to new conversations in psychoanalysis child development education and linguistics through an exploration of the unconscious concomitants of first language acquisition. |Rethinking Autism with Dolto Syllable Soup
