ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 begins with recollections from the author’s research trip to Paris, then takes the reader on a curious journey from Dolto’s clinical work, through her family life, back to the hotel on Rue Vineuse as it elaborates, through examples, the transference of one invested phoneme—«port(e)»—in its associations across her corpus. Its diffusion in extensive homonymic plays becomes an uncanny demonstration that offers potent suggestions to theory, as it reveals how thinking is rooted in dream-work, so our learning is continuously affected by archaic echoes. The reader encounters Dolto’s notion of the “umbilical castration,” and Dolto redefines the phoneme as a psychoanalytic construct—a unit of sound with a vital, unconscious, idiosyncratic role in psychical development.
