An Irish nurse frequently took care of her when she was a baby and developed a close bond with her, to the point that her parents then had to learn to speak English to get her to smile.

Her parents fired the nurse when she was 8 months old, for a grave mistake: in order to finance her addiction to opium, which was popular in Belle époque Paris, she would prostitute herself at an establishment where she would leave baby Françoise's pram unattended at the door.

In 1932, Marc Schlumberger [fr] introduced Dolto to psychoanalyst René Laforgue, who had already begun to treat her brother Philip a year earlier.

At the end of February 1934, she began a three-year analysis with Laforgue, which had a major impact on her life,[4] helping to free her of her neurosis – of her education, her origin, and her depressive mother.

During her medical training, working under Dr. Georges Heuyer, she met Sophie Morgenstern, who was the first to practice psychoanalysis with children in France, and who would subsequently be a mentor for her.

[5] She listened to the sick children who came to her for treatment, Dolto began (with the encouragement of Edouard Pichon) to specialise in child psychology, as a psychoanalytic pediatrician.

She emphasized the physical aspects of the mother-baby dyad, and stressed the importance of observation and understanding of the means of communication used by children with psychological problems, or learning and social disabilities.