Sujet Bingo, point macho !

Personnellement j’avais juste dit que les accusations qu’elle aurait des accointances avec l’extrême-droite ne semblaient pas suffisamment étayées par les sources qui avaient été évoquées (peut-être qu’il y en a d’autres plus convaincantes). J’ai relu, je ne vois pas trop de choses à changer.

Françoise Dolto submitted her doctorate on “Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics” just before the declaration of the war, in July 1939, following which she immedi- ately set up in medical practice. The young Françoise came from a middle-class Catholic family, who were followers of Charles Maurras. At that time she shared her family’s ideals. On July 21, 1940 she wrote to her father: “I believe in the recov- ery of France and the line Pétain has chosen.”17 During the war she worked at the children’s outpatient department at the Hôpital Trousseau, where she specialized in reflux babies and bed-wetting disorders. She also worked in another institution, the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems, created by Doctor Alexis Carrel18 in 1941, where the research of the Vichy regime was showcased. Carrel’s foundation was a right-wing manifestation of the encyclopedic project. Carrel wanted to create a new “science of man” based on social biology. He was
a negative reputation had preceded Allendy to Montpellier.
and ill, he died on July 12, 1942. Just prior to his death he had finished three books: L’ enfance méconnue, Aristote ou le complexe de trahison, and Journal d’un médecin malade. This last book (Diary of a Sick Doctor) chronicles his agony and reveals that the person who denounced him was French, but he didn’t seem to know pre- cisely who it was. There remain many gray areas in these tumultuous times.
ment at the Hôpital Trousseau, Madame Codet kept doing psychoanalysis.
Exhausted, isolated,

Psychoanalysis under the Vichy Regime 43
supported by the Rockefeller Foundation where he had worked when he was in the United States, and by the American lobby in Vichy. The new foundation was entrusted to carry out the political program outlined in Man, The Unknown, which was to rebuild a civilized human being under the control of scientists, and create, through eugenics, a “hereditary biological aristocracy.” There were three main areas of study: the mental improvement of the French people, man at work, and childhood (the Centre for Mother and Child).
Françoise Dolto was hired by the Centre for Mother and Child in December 1942, on a full-time salary. We don’t know exactly how long she worked there.19 More especially we don’t know if she resigned in November 1943 when several researchers left the foundation, exposing what many saw as an ideologically ques- tionable and scientifically dangerous enterprise. All we do know is that she was a student of Laforgue, with whom she had a falling out after the war, and although she was a first rate clinician, politics was never her forté. But the fact of having worked for an institution of the Vichy regime, and/or one that would be collabo- rationist, did not imply that she herself adhered to these ideas. There were all kinds of people at the foundation: from die-hard Pétain supporters such as Carrel and Dr. Ménétrier to Trotskyites such as Pierre Naville, as well as Resistance fight- ers who were in hiding there. Still it is worth noting that Dolto never mentioned this part of her career in any of the many autobiographical publications she pro- duced toward the end of her life.