Bécache, Ève

Mothers and babies prison: The experience of the nursery group at the women’s prison in Lyon Corbas - 2020.


20

In this article, we present a mother-child/pregnant women’s group set up at the Nursery of the women’s prison in Lyon-Corbas and run by a psychologist and a child psychiatrist used to working with mothers and their children in “ordinary psychiatry”. The women we met confronted us with questions specific to borderline personality structures questioning the place of the child, present or future, in the light of the primary and archaic bond between the woman and her own mother, which curbs, supplants or encroaches on the woman’s bond with her own baby… How can we weave or even imagine a mother/child bond with these women in the grips of narcissistic and identity-related suffering, where ruptures, discontinuity and destructiveness punctuate psychic and daily life? Which child is it? How can we support access to maternity in this very peculiar place of detention and what are the repercussions specific to the prison environment? Finally, what kind of caring envelope and structure can be elaborated, established and supported?