Rethinking Autism with Dolto

<P><I>Rethinking Autism with Dolto </I>takes up a principal legacy of Fran¿se Dolto¿s immense project¿her conviction that autism is a regression to the archaic.</P><P>Dolto theorizes that the infant <I>in utero</I>, deep in dreams, is receptive to the audition of ¿phonemes¿ during the pre-conscious ¿archaic stage¿ of psychosexual maturation. That dream-work on words¿an idiosyncratic prehistory at the onset of mental and emotional life¿secures the unconscious circulation of affect and the ontogeny of thought long prior to speech, seeding associative thinking and facilitating self-regulation. Kathleen Saint-Onge uses the written work of four nonverbal autistic authors in seeking corroboration for Dolto¿s formulations, finding thoughtful self-reflections that relate the experience of living in silence with relentless anxiety while relying on regression as a defence. Dolto¿s unprecedented insights into the infant¿s earliest learning carry formidable implications for autism interventions, a