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With the exception of his “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), Freud seldom ventured into the actual practice of child psychotherapy, though he affirmed the “possibility of observing in children at first hand and in all the freshness of life the sexual impulses and wishes which we dig out so laboriously in adults from among their own débris” (Freud 6). Rosine Lefort's Lacanian case study of two young children during the early 1950s (in collaboration with her husband, Robert Lefort) is another contribution to this growing field of inquiry, though the work exhibits serious methodological gaps in its premises and conclusions.1
Lefort presents two case studies, one of a 13-month-old girl, Nadia, and the other of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, Marie-Françoise. Both are patients at Parent de Rosan, a children's institution designed to care for very young children who either had been abandoned at birth and were awaiting adoption or foster-care placement, or were there temporarily due to serious maternal illness. Like several of the most well-known case studies of young children, including Freud's, Melanie Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis , and D.W. Winnicott's The Piggle (1977), Lefort's account makes for engrossing and, at times, suspenseful reading. However, there are several important differences between the analysands of these other accounts and Lefort's.
First, unlike Freud's “little Hans,” Winnicott's “Piggle,” or Klein's “Richard,” Lefort's analysands are both physically ill: Nadia suffers from chronic, painful ear infections necessitating minor surgeries, and her growth is noticeably retarded. Marie-Françoise presents symptoms of autism, cannot walk unassisted, has a very low developmental IQ, and possesses an eating disorder characterized by Lefort as bulimia. Second and no less significant, both are orphans: Nadia from birth, and Marie-Françoise after one month. Though Lefort makes very little of these realities (and, indeed, admits to being