ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 surveys Dolto’s childhood setting and its associative pathways, as it considers texts as material for dream-work. The reader encounters echoes of Dolto’s early history with books in “diffuse transference” across her corpus, begging the question, “What is reading?” The legacy of archaically invested phonemes to the mother tongue becomes patent in the “luring effects of the transference” that return the “sonar bath” of infancy to deliver a «semblable» [“similar”]. Dolto notes that homophones are particularly rich in offering continuity with unconscious security. As names from Dolto’s first neighborhood draw our “floating attention,” she suggests that the work of words in our coming to reality as a stratification upon our prehistories—“presentification”—is served by epistolary relations.
