73

With the arrival of coronavirus, hospitals, which are usually erect, rigid and structured, went through an experience of chaos, of Kleinian schizo-paranoid and primary enigma, before they were able to rediscover a new, reconstructed coherence. Confronted with too much external reality, their symbolic and imaginary functions broke down. Losing the customary security of the surrounding world during the traumatic phase, a world that had become hostile and fragmented, they had to find, like the infant, points of support to restore their sense of self and of coherence. This text is a sort of testimony; it shares the experience of a child psychiatric team which intervened in “covid wards” during the health crisis in the months of March and April 2020, that is the first phase of the epidemic during which the entire French population was under lockdown. It offers an artistic backcloth as a sublimatory space for transcending the reality of illness and death.