L'accaparement comme réponse au traumatisme chez l'enfant placé en institution

Abstract

In the field of child welfare, the research the present article instances investigates the experience of the child placed in a care institution who has often lived through early relational failings and temporary or final separation. Starting out from the traumatic nature of affective and educational deprivation suffered by the child and its consequences on their psyche, the authors consider the process of repetition at work with these raw psychic traces in intersubjec-tive relations. From the clinical case of a nine-year-old girl, Olivia, they study how the child in placement, suffering from a fundamental crisis of identity, sought to shape a symbolising response to her traumatic experience onto the institutional environment of foster care, through what might be called an intense "monopolising" of her objectal surroundings.