ABSTRACT
Francoise Marette Dolto had the sensibility of an artist and became a skilled painter, potter, and sculptor. However, her imagination also encompassed the sciences, and from an early age she became interested in the development of communication systems, encouraged by her father. Her mother seems to have found her intelligent, irrepressible daughter, with her strange ideas and defiance of what was conventional for girls, incomprehensible. Francoise Marette resolved as a young girl that she would try to become a médecin d’éducation, a term of her invention that described a doctor who would understand the emotions and the relationships between human beings which underpinned what is expressed in illness. In Autoportrait d’une psychanalyste, Francoise Dolto describes the summer of 1931, when Suzanne Marette took Francoise to visit the family of old friends of Jacqueline, in Provence. Francoise Dolto was the object of prejudice and criticism within her own society; she was particularly undermined by Lebovici.
