Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. She has taught literature and writing for many years. She is currently Professor Emerita in Literature at the University of California at San Diego. She has mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical forms of thinking.
Night Philosophy
Night Philosophy
Fanny Howe
Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist.
Afterword by Chris Kraus.
- 978-1-9164250-2-6
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 130 pp.
- Paperback
- January 2020
About the author
Endorsements (5)
This book is a prism through which Earth’s ancient songs and tales are distilled; restored to light. It is also a manual for surviving evil. The most important thing for you to understand is that Fanny Howe is a rebel, down to the cellular level. She walks with the prophets and with the unborn. There is no writer like her.
Fanny Howe is simply one of the best and most innovative writers alive.
Night Philosophy is sharp and precise. All the time, like a powerful undercurrent, a voltage charger, or Cordelia speaking, language itself exerts its primacy; it insists on remaining true not just to human hope, human feeling, or the questing spirit, but to some idea of a power beyond ourselves.
History and images of what we do to each other are illuminated, and then made to sing lurid, fluid truth.
Fanny Howe is a hallowed voice of the violent and brutal twentieth century. A sacred idiot, a wise friend who passes a bottle of warmth through the icy night, who fishes for what haunts the depths.
Press (16)
Rights
- Danish (Møllegades)
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescenttrans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
Françoise Dolto
trans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst.
While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study of French society in the 1960s.
Foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz.
- 978-1-7395161-9-2
- 13 b&w illustrations
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 264 pp.
- Paperback
- July 2025
About the author
Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.

About the translators (3)
Ivan Kats (1926–2008), naturalised American, worked as a translator, editor, teacher, publisher and journalist in France and the United States. He graduated with an MA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1969. In 1970 he founded the Obor Foundation, dedicated to the publication and dissemination of books to book-poor countries, which he directed until his retirement in 1996.
Lionel Bailly is a practising psychoanalyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale, an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, he is honorary professor at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He led the Sainte-Anne Hospital Centre’s biopsychopathology unit before moving to London in 2000. Bailly is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009).
Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalyst (member, British Psychoanalytical Society) and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She translated Françoise Dolto’s The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge 2022) and has edited two books on Lacanian theory. She works in the NHS and in private practice, and teaches and supervises psychodynamic/psychoanalytic practitioners.
Rights
- French (Seuil)