ABSTRACT

Chapter 7 elaborates Dolto’s history of scribing, including her personal correspondence and her public letters on behalf of Santa Claus. Suggestions resound in homonymic plays on archaically invested phonemes (words) that echo from her early landscape to her clinical texts—streets, statues, plaques and family names—inviting the question, “What is writing?” The reader encounters Dolto’s “unconscious image of the body” and four of her dreams, along with her valuation of co-writing as the “script-girl.” Dolto believes that “all is language” for humans, who are continually engaged in a phantasy of self-sufficiency—yet who need offers of resonances serving the transference. Thus, the «après-coup» originating thought signals an enigmatic relation between passivity and literacy, revealing our constitutional melancholy.