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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.j072vq

>

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Superego and superego’s fate of the mentally handicapped child’s mother

Abstract

The clinical experience concerning the mentally handicapped child is a very complex one. The defences that the families, and in particular the mothers, set up in order to cope with the suffering created by the handicap make the transferential relationships really hard to establish. The principal observations highlight clinical facts that appear with a certain frequency in most of the families: the omnipresence of the mother concerning the child’s care and the symbolic father’s disappearance in the family system. The lack of the paternal third-party, who is supposed to symbolize the oedipal metaphor, generates an ambivalent attitude of the mother which leads to a situation where the child becomes an enjoyment object such as the idol for the pervert. Without otherness, without a third-party, dealing with the diagnosis is frequently impossible and leads to a denial of the handicap along with a speech tinged with persecution and rivalry between the different persons being part of the child’s and the mother’s environment. Like the only child who, on the occasion of a baby brother’s birth, can psycho-affectively regress (i.e.: he was house-trained until the baby brother’s was born), the mother, subsequently to the trauma created by the announcement of the diagnosis, would know a psychic regression caused by the collapse of the ideal, collapse which is induced by giving birth to a handicapped child. This thesis intends to demonstrate that these attitudes are, according to us, the result of a mostly superego’s distress. The approach we chose for this work is the superego’s perspective because we believe that there is no clinical experience that better illustrates this notion of criticism, censorship and judgment to decide between normal and pathologic than the one of the handicapped child.We assumed hypothetically that after the announcement of the handicap, the mother, normally pacified by the oedipal paternal superego (the superego as it was conceived by S. Freud), would all of a sudden find herself in a pre-oedipal superego’s position (the superego as it was conceived by J. Lacan and M. Klein). Through a conceptual study of the superego and the interlinking with the feminine, we suggest, by means of this thesis, to connect the clinical experience and the theory. Several clinical case vignettes will support our assumptions and, in fine, we will describe our therapeutic clinical approach which aims at re-introducing the symbolic paternal third-party and help the mother take the reverse course.

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