Françoise Dolto

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   A child can bear almost any truth told at their measure, but cannot bear a secret they sense without being able to name it — because then they do not explain the reality, they explain themselves as guilty.

   La cause des enfants · 1985

   In the absence of an explanation, the cause a child finds is themselves.

   Dolto was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who became, through her 1970s radio programmes, the most listened-to voice about children in France. Her central thesis is that a baby is, from day one, a being of language: they understand tone, being addressed and above all the fact that they are being spoken to, long before they understand words. The practical consequence is unusual and was contested: she spoke to infants about hard things — a separation, a death, a hospitalisation, an adoption — in simple, true words, and reported that symptoms such as refusing food or ceaseless crying subsided. Her argument is not magical. A child perceives the change of atmosphere in any case; what they cannot do alone is assign it an external cause. In the absence of an explanation, the cause they find is themselves. Naming the reality takes them out of the position of implicit culprit. The more contested part of her legacy concerns certain public formulations about infantile sexuality, severely criticised in France later; that does not annul the principle of truth told at the child's measure, but it is honest to mention.

   “Everything that is lived and left unsaid becomes, for the child, something unbearable.”

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