Rozenberg, Gaëlle

“Madame Jean”: How to be a parent when faced with autism - 2017.


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The SEPAD (an early education service in the home) is a home-based clinical set-up created to work with children presenting severe developmental troubles. The originality of the set-up consists in its offer of individual educational accompaniment at home using play as the medium of the encounters. The support system comes from multidisciplinary institutional work. This article considers the transferential effects created by the singularity of these individual encounters at home, supported by a team working in the institution. The clinical example proposed is that of an autistic child and his parents, whose particular mode of interaction creates an illusion of abuse in the mind of the educator and, by extension, in those of the support team. Such relational modes can be understood as means used by the parents to fight against psychic paralysis provoked by their child’s autistic troubles. Alternating between educational work at home and family consultations within the service makes it possible to accompany this parenting work, which is seriously put to the test by autism.