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Working Psychoanalytically with Infants: From Françoise Dolto to Zhuang Zhou

Author(s) : Nicole Yvert Coursilly

Reviews and Endorsements

Nicole Yvert detects the potential vitality present in the most helpless children, who have already faced unspeakable disaster. She trusts that each of them harbours a desire for an other, and she prepares the way for the life force to resume its course in them by passing through her. Indeed, the entire burgeoning psychic activity of an infant, expressed in his body, tends towards an other, it seeks the psychic life and the words of another speaking being.
But it is not only the words which heal, beyond the words, there is the vibrant energy animating the body of the living, speaking person. Nicole Yvert identifies the signs through which the body can speak —a sort of sign language (the little human emits signals in search of someone who can receive them), — or a sort of graphic language. The analyst offers her listening, listening which deciphers : her action as a witness- sign reader transforms these signs into an existential statement which ties both her and the infant to humanity through the common bond of speech.
Pascale Hassoun, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, founding member of Cercle Freudien and its former president. Founder of Che Vuoi journal. Between 2003 and 2016, contributed to the creation of the Chengdu Psychoanalytic Center (China)

In the scarcely hundred pages of her book, Nicole Yvert tells the story of a non-negotiable minimum : that sought by an infant in his relation to the helpful other — here, the analyst — , the minimum needed by his vitality to take hold of the thread of a life uniquely his. Providing this minimum is quite demanding. Access to the tools of psychoanalytic theory does not exempt the analyst from "thinking his place" and from redefining it day after day. The author describes herself humbly as a "clairvoyant witness", a "tuner" of human instruments, a catalyst, interacting with a singular other who is not to be reduced to his catastrophic entrance into the world. The work takes place at a more fundamental level: the level of life energy which connects the infant with the other who responds to his quest. Who gives to whom?
Based on her long experience, Nicole Yvert asserts that both protagonists gain stronger bonds with their humanity.
Philippe Jousset, literature professor, Université Aix-Marseille, Marseille, France

In Working Psychoanalytically with Infants, Nicole Yvert leads the reader to the scene of her work as an analyst with pre-verbal patients. She describes simply, clearly and with great sensitivity her manner of entering into transference with these children who, having been removed from their families and entrusted to an infant care home or a foster home, are waiting to hear a true account of these events — the truth that can reawaken their desire to live.
We are in awe of her dazzling interpretations, even as she explains how she can decipher on a baby’s body the trauma that no one before her has been able to put into words for him.
She presents the elements constituting the support she needs to play this singular and trying role in the lives of these babies. She draws support from two sources: the theory developed by Freud and his disciples, and Chine thought on the void, this companion of availability uniquely suited to the perceptions of signs. Reading this book leaves the reader unsettled, perhaps even transformed. It constitutes an exceptional experience for a reader receptive to the vitality to which it testifies.
José Morel Cinq-Mars, psychoanalyst and author