About this event

Dominique by Françoise Dolto: A Discussion with Eleanor Ivory Weber, Perwana Nazif and Lionel Bailly. 

Divided Publishing, the celebrated independent publisher of Francesc Tosquelles, Fanny Howe and others, recently brought back into print the 1971 case study Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent by child psychoanalyst Francoise Dolto, a leading light of the Other French School. In the words of Jamieson Webster, Dominique is ‘the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence’.

Publisher Eleanor Ivory Weber, with Psychoanalyst and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist Lionel Bailly and writer Perwana Nazif, will discuss Dolto, her context, the case study as a literary form and the various manifestations of the unconscious in and beyond this clinically relevant study.

Presentations:

In her work with the adolescent Dominique over twelve sessions, Françoise Dolto ‘writes everything down’. These are the words of Dominique himself; the psychoanalyst repeats them in her commentary – ‘an allusion to me, who writes down everything he says’. Eleanor Ivory Weber will comment on the place of writing in the case and consider the way the word ‘everything’ (tout) appears repeatedly in Dominique’s speech and in Dolto’s commentary. For psychoanalysis, the ‘every’ (-thing, -body, -day) is the very location of our enquiry and at the same time also a way for subjects to avoid or generalise their desire.

In the case of Dominique, a moment is described in which, travelling from France to Belgium, the adolescent describes the film Battleship Potemkin in relation to his time in the Cévennes network of Fernand Deligny. Recasting his experience of Monoblet, France as a battleship, he remarks: 'The educators dig the hole; Deligny, on the other hand, fills it in.'

Perwana Nazif's presentation will take this phrase as its point of departure, considering Deligny’s attempt to sustain a collective life with so-called ‘maladjusted' children without attempting to educate, correct or assimilate them into society towards a specific classification of the human. In dialogue with Dolto’s case, Nazif will ask what it might mean to 'fill the [w]hole' in relation to psychoanalysis, to render the network’s attempt towards autistic temporality and spatiality.

Perwana Nazif is a writer and contributing editor at Parapraxis Magazine. She recently edited Institutional Psychotherapy as a Resistance Movement by François Pain (2025) and is currently working on a monograph on Fernand Deligny. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Eleanor Ivory Weber is currently doctoral researcher at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on Lacanian psychoanalysis and experimental art as formalisations of an internal limit in the capitalist discourse. She is a co-founder and co-director with Camilla Wills of Divided Publishing, which in 2025 published the revised English translation of Francoise Dolto's Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent. 

Lionel Bailly is a psychoanalyst and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. He is a practicing analyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale and an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He trained in medicine and psychiatry at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. After a long collaboration with Jean Bergès he became head of Sainte-Anne’s Biopsychopathology Unit, which he led until moving to London in 2000. He is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner's Guide (in English).

If you are attending in person you have the option to purchase your ticket plus a copy of the book 'Francoise Dolto's Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent' at a special discounted rate. 

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This lecture will be recorded and available for 7 days after the lecture takes place

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski: Storm Inside

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