At the age of eight, Françoise Dolto decided to become a “doctor-educator”, explaining: this is a doctor who knows that children sometimes get sick from the way they are brought up. Years later, an outstanding child psychoanalyst managed to convey this truth to millions of other adults, helping them understand that they should always be “on the side of the child” (the title of one of her main books). Her last book was born from conversations with her daughter, also a psychoanalyst, Catherine Dolto, and a friend of Catherine Colette Pershminier, and was published after the death of Françoise Dolto. Here she speaks directly to the teenagers themselves — and she always knew how to find a common language with them like no one else. And like no one understood the difficulties of this age, describing it as a second birth. And the teenager was compared to a defenseless lobster, which lost its shell during the molt and is exposed to many dangers until it grows a new one. Dolto in his book extends a helping hand to a teenager. This is the same adult who understands and accepts everything, which is so urgently needed by every person in adolescence and which is so lacking in real life. Meeting him at least on the pages of a book can be a great stroke of luck.
Vector, 192 p., 2015.