Rethinking Autism with Dolto - Syllable Soup

Rethinking Autism with Dolto takes up a principal legacy of Fran-se Dolto-s immense project-her conviction that autism is a regression to the archaic.

Dolto theorizes that the infant in utero, 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