Françoise Dolto and Maison Verte

Françoise Dolto is one of the most significant figures in French psychoanalysis, and in child psychoanalysis in particular. She was extraordinarily attuned to children, with a rare gift for listening to and understanding each one.

From Dolto’s biography, we know that as a child she was intensely curious, forever stumping the adults around her with her questions. She dreamed of becoming a “doctor-educator” who could help children suffering from “adults’ failure to understand them.”

Françoise Dolto trained in medicine and defended a thesis titled “Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics,” after which she devoted herself entirely to psychoanalytic work, becoming a truly brilliant practitioner. She tended to use theoretical concepts to make sense of what happened in her actual sessions with a child, rather than the other way around. While she used the standard techniques of working with children — play, modeling clay, drawing — she gave the greatest weight of all to the spoken word.

Her husband, Boris Dolto, founded a new medical field — kinesitherapy — and established the French School of Massage and Orthopedics. Françoise was very close to her husband, and the two complemented and enriched each other, especially in their shared understanding of the many-layered interplay between psyche and body.

To pass on her psychoanalytic experience, Dolto invented a new format entirely: future practitioners trained by observing her own sessions directly. It’s hard to overstate the impact she had on how children were worked with across every childcare institution in France.

Her books translated into Russian include: The Protected World of Childhood, On the Child’s Side, On the Adolescent’s Side, The Unconscious Image of the Body, The Mirror Child, Psychoanalysis and Education, Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics, and others.

Beyond her many papers, seminars, and radio appearances, she left us the idea of “Maison Verte” (the “Green House”), later taken up by specialists in other countries, including Russia, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Around 100 Maisons Vertes are running in France today.

The first “Green House” opened on January 6, 1979. “It’s not a nursery school, not a diagnostic center — it’s the first stone laid toward the ‘House of Childhood’ that Françoise Dolto believed should exist: a place children could go before nursery and school. A place of rest and encounter, where children are treated as people, where everyone is interested in everyone else, where anonymity is respected, and the one thing that truly matters is human presence — a mother or father never leaves their child alone at the Maison Verte; the parents rest there too, or find something of their own to do. They meet other parents there. Families are received by a team of three, including at least one man; no treatment is prescribed, no examinations are carried out, not a single specialized assessment. These people are simply there, present alongside the families, listening to and talking with the children in front of their parents.”

Maison Verte is a free social space that any family with a young child (0 to 4 years old) can walk into — or even people who are only just planning to have one. The doors of the Green House are open to everyone, without exception. There’s no appointment to book, no papers or documents required to come in.

At first, parents wondered exactly what happened at the Maison Verte, since at a glance it looked as though the staff and parents were simply spending time together. Dolto’s answer: “Yes, we’re simply spending time, and we talk about life, which changes every minute, and we call everything by its real name — everything to do with the active life these children need to be ready for and capable within.” She stated her position plainly: “A human being is something that changes daily, day after day, and becomes more human, develops further, in reaching to enter into the communicative bonds that exist between people. Communication can herald a qualitative shift, but it belongs to a different dimension of the human being — communication is the central variable, provided it leads to mutual pleasure for those who enter into it. Protecting one’s own desire, and not taking root in someone else’s by appropriating it as one’s own, is central to building one’s own individuality.”

And yet, in childhood, a person tends to “get everything wrong.” Calling that back the other way — helping a child discover and hold onto their own desire — is the overarching task of the preventive work we carry out at the Maison Verte, continuously.“

It’s precisely the open, welcoming environment of the Green House that lets everyone focus on this: every child is a subject, and above all, a speaking subject. A child doesn’t take in the world only through sight, taste, smell, and touch. It’s the word addressed to them, specifically, that admits a child into human society and lets them feel part of it.

Every visitor to Maison Verte very quickly grasped the difference between talking at a child and talking with a child. And, crucially, talking with a child honestly — because a child’s unconscious knows the truth regardless. Every young subject has the right to know the story of where they came from, their family’s history, and everything they might see or hear at home.

At the door of a Maison Verte, families are met by the accueillants — specialists in early childhood: analysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, educators, pediatricians. “These people are simply there, present alongside them, listening to and talking with the children in front of their parents” — and they’re also the people who can offer support to mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, full of their own worries about raising a young subject.

We know that it’s in the relationship with the mother that a child first finds basic trust in the world, learns to communicate, and learns to tolerate frustration. That first social experience shapes not only the child’s physical and psychical development but their wellbeing as a whole. A great deal of research now exists on this earliest experience and the environment a child is immersed in. Many analysts pay close attention to early childhood, since it’s often exactly there that the source of the problems people bring to them later can be found.

Françoise Dolto created a space where parents could discover that “in every child… there lives and develops an intuitive project of being related to by others as to an adult. Which means the child expects to be treated, and respected, the same way an adult would be.” She never tired of repeating that every bodily and emotional expression a child produces before the age of three is itself a kind of language: facial expressions, crying, drawings, toys, and so on. “At the Maison Verte, every mother learns to pay attention to a baby’s rich array of expressions,” and sees for herself that from the very earliest age, a child hears and understands everything that is said — and everything that goes unsaid. “The child acts in unison with the mood expressed in the spoken word.” And indeed, parents are often astonished to “discover how their children understand the world. What they had first taken for tics, quirks, whims, or foolishness — the very things that got on their nerves — reveals instead a remarkable web of physical connections, built up around the most ordinary events of a child’s first years, at a time when the young couple’s life is already weighed down with plenty of its own problems.”

Even though a spirit of freedom and spontaneous play reigns at the Green House, the accueillants still explain a few rules to every child. “When a mother arrives with her child, we talk to the child and show them around: ‘This is the bathroom — for grown-ups and for little ones alike…’ If it’s a very young baby, we say: ‘This is the changing table, this is where mama can change you.’ ‘Here’s what you can push around, here’s the water basin, the slide, the toys, the drawing board. You can play whatever you like. There’s only one rule: you can only play with the water wearing a rubber apron. And if you’re on the slide, you can’t go past this line…’” The welcoming environment of Maison Verte helps a child “discover and hold on to their own desire,” and learn tolerance for others, mutual help, friendship, integration, independence — and a gentle, non-traumatic entry into society.

I’d like to close this long piece with Dolto’s own words, as relevant today as ever: “In our collective awareness, we still have an enormous distance to travel before we understand that a child’s early upbringing, in the company of others like them, is task number one. What falls under the heading of school and education is, at present, not treated as the central thing — not as a matter of the first importance.”