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Parentalité en danger : La situation des mères gravement traumatisées
Abstract
Our aim is to think about the possible traumatic transmission from mother to child who has not been directly exposed to traumatizing events. We propose a clinical case. Its purpose, besides the care, is the prevention with the child. The frame of the care is ethno-psychiatric. The complementary approach allowed taking into account psychic and cultural elements of the story of the mother to try to build a sense and to understand the place of the child in the psychic economy of the mother. We try to bring to light the possible springs of the traumatic transmission in the relationship mother-baby. We suggest approaching this question by means of attachment theory, we hypothesize that the pathological childhood material, exacerbated by the psychological trauma, paves the way for maternal frightened expressions and becomes a potential channel for traumatic transmission from mother to infant. We shall bring to light the clinical work in ethno-psychoanalytical frame but also the interest of a work in network.
... Cette brève observation est développée dans un article coécrit(Gioan & Mestre 2010). Le groupe thérapeutique est constitué par deux psychologues cliniciennes Estelle Gioan et Bérénise Quattoni. ...
Pardonning, spiritual act, psychological act
Forgiveness is like love or happiness: it is and cannot be explained, it cannot be referred to a single field of the social sciences, it belongs to several. It seems that it comes from a monotheist tradition then its fate was to become globalized. What interests me here, is the place of forgiveness in psychotherapy, its effect on the psyche. Forgiveness, as a voluntary act, as a word in the illocutoire strength of execution, induces a psychic process, but does not substitute itself for it totally, it transforms a thought, and sometimes is similar to the mourning process. It breaks the vicious cycle of the avenging relation, and frees the man of his acts. So, he cannot be reduced to the only psychoanalytical dimension, therefore the necessity of the « complementarism »: it is at the contact point of this spiritual and psychic act that the change and the transformation of the thought and the psyche is produced. Its impact is analyzed through two clinical stories stemming from the transcultural consultation: in the first situation, a girl forgives her dying mother, and in the second a dead mother to her surviving son.
Based on a sociological study of perinatal health education programmes for foreign pregnant women in France, this article examines the ways in which the educational discourse of health professionals reproduces gender, race and class domination. During the group sessions, the health workers educate the participants in good maternal practices in using a modelization of cultural alterisation, referring the foreign women to a doubly archaic culture of origin : from the medical point of view and from the point of view of gender equality. These processes of cultural alterisation help to reinforce relations of gender, race and class domination, while at the same time continuing the history of health education for working-class and racialised mothers and mothers-to-be.
Research has been carried out to explore the countertransference reactions of a group of therapists faced with a mother having experienced traumatic events and her baby. The study highlights the potential advantages of a group setting for supporting these dyads.
Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
Exploration of countertransference: reactivating the therapist’s thinking process facing traumatised dyads
Analytical and developmental work on countertransference of carers lies at the heart of the therapeutic relationship. In the management of traumatised patients, the therapist is confronted by specific internalised experiences resulting from traumatic events lived out whose reality must be recognised by the carers in order to avoid sudden mental paralysis (sideration). Therapeutic groups are increasingly being resorted to, including groups of patients but also groups of carers. The present research explores the countertransferential feelings emerging within a group of therapists confronted by a traumatised mother and her baby. These transference reactions are studied in focus groups against a background of different health care settings. An illustration is proposed, highlighting the creativity of the group setting in psychic trauma and perinatal clinical work.
In this paper, we advance a new approach to the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust experiences, by focusing on attachment theory. The approach is used as a framework for interpretation of the results of three studies on Holocaust survivors and their offspring, from different countries (The Netherlands, Canada, and Israel), and based on different conceptual approaches and methods of data collection (quantitative as well as qualitative). The literature is divided with regard to the extent and depth of long-term effects of the Holocaust. Attachment theory allows the integration of the phenomena of attachment, separation, and loss, which appear to be core concepts in the three studies presented here. The notion of insecure-ambivalent attachment sheds some light on the observed preoccupation with issues of attachment and separation in the second generation. Furthermore, the theme of “the conspiracy of silence” is discussed in the context of attachment disorganisation. Attachment theory transcends the traditional boundaries between clinical and nonclinical interpretations, in stressing the continuous and cumulative nature of favourable and unfavourable child-rearing circumstances. In this context, insecure attachment should be regarded as coping with suboptimal child-rearing environments.
While strong retrospective and concurrent associations between maternal and infant patterns of attachment have been noted, this is one of the first reports of a prospective investigation of such associations. The Adult Attachment Interview was administered to 100 mothers expecting their first child, and, at 1-year follow-up, 96 of these were seen with their infants at 12 months in the Strange Situation. Maternal representations of attachment (autonomous vs. dismissing or preoccupied) predicted subsequent infant-mother attachment patterns (secure vs. insecure) 75% of the time. These observed concordances, as well as the discordances, are discussed in terms of the uniquely powerful contribution the Adult Attachment Interview makes to the study of representational and intergenerational influences on the development of the infant-mother attachment.
Our aim is to think about the possible traumatic transmission from mother to child who has not been directly exposed to traumatizing events. We propose a clinical case: Étoile escaped from Nigeria, threatened by her father's murderous madness. He had attempted against her mother and sister's life for religion reasons. In France she gave birth to a girl. In front of the gravity of the traumatic symptoms, psychotherapy is proposed. Its purpose, besides the care, is the prevention with the child. The setting of the care is ethno-psychiatric. The complementary approach (anthropology and psychoanalysis) allowed to taking into account psychic and cultural elements of the story of the mother to try to build a sense and to understand the place of the child in the psychic economy of the mother. We try to bring to light the possible springs of the traumatic transmission in the relationship mother-baby. We suggest approaching this question by means of the analysis of counter-transference, according to the approach proposed by Lachal: analyse of counter-transference of therapist in the couple mother-child would allow to understand what takes place between the mother and the child. We deepen this hypothesis by the study of the emergent scenario in ethno-psychoanalytical frame.
- Molénat Françoise