The handicapped child. A psychoanalytic study

On the basis of his twenty year experience as a psychoanalytic psychologist in a CAMSP With children suffering from all types of handicaps, aged 0 to 6 and their families, the author attempts to clarify this clinical domain by using a psychoanalytic approach. In light of the notion of strangeness which marks this child making him different from the others, we shall see how he is constantly exposed to the others' horrified and fascinated gaze, to the mother's gaze and to society's gaze. What are the psychic processes and what are the evolutionary steps in the construction of the identity of this child "not like the others" such as they may be distinguished during long-term psychotherapy? Like a shattered mirror, the handicapped child makes the necessary identifications difficult, and forces us to reconsider otherness in the simultaneity of difference and resemblance, by unmasking the usual categories which radicalize positions, either accentuating the handicap which will then conceal the rest of the personnality or maintaining the lure of illusory normalization. In conclusion author proposes several perspectives concerning an innovative approach to the integration of handicapped children in child care factilities which ordinarily take in young children.