La tyrannie chez l'enfant porteur de handicap

Abstract

Many children affected with a handicap develop tyrannical behavioural patterns. This is related to the effects of shame and guilt. The trauma of being faced with a handicap dictates what might be called the working through of guilt and the working through of shame. Working through guilt leads, among other things, to exhibiting guilt fantasies, whose function is to reduce the traumatic nature of the experience and encourage its subjectivation. Working through shame onsists,among other things, in encapsulating the traumatic experience and keeping any pleasure involved secret ; this pleasure is visible in the symbiotic link favoured by the handicap. This work affects incestuous wishes as well as desires to kill, in other words, the feelings of hate caused by these experiences.Tyranny can be an effect of shame, humiliation having as its counterpart narcissistic grandiosity. Besides, the universe of tyranny is anal, as is that of shame. Hence tyranny, grandiosity, shame and anality are interlinked.In the context of treatment of guilt and shame, the tyranny of the child carries with it the questions of the search for the object, resistance to the narcissistic and fantasy heritage, the perception of limits to pulsionality, and illustrates certain failures in parenting.© L'Esprit du Temps.