Group and Play. Analytic Psychodrama with Children
Abstract
In this article, the author gives an account of the treatment stages that a child and his family may undertake, starting from the initial request for help to the child participation to a Psychodrama Group and the parent’s consultations with other therapists.
The characteristic of child psychotherapy is that the initial help request is brought by the adults and not by the child. Hence the importance of a preliminary work, designed to untangle the parents request in order to have access to the child subjective demand.
The entry into the group gives to the child one of the possibilities to access to the experience, which is shared with other peers, in order to recover the symptomatic root in his discourse, as a subject in the relationship with the familiar Other. The child’s symptom is in essence a response to the desire of this Other. Therefore group and Play will assume a particular dynamic through the sessions.
The references to Freud and Lacan, followed by the description of two clinical vignettes, highlight the participants’ emerging issues that develop around the construction of the family romance according to the founding father of psychoanalysis and the reinterpretation of the French psychoanalyst on The Neurotic’s Individual Myth. Through the structural categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real, the child’s discourse is analyzed in its relationship with the sexuation, which recalls Freud’s Infantile Sexual Read more