Pouillaude, Élie <br/><br/>
Parenting under the challenge of early childhood handicap: From trauma to narrative function 

 -  2018.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 72 
<br/><br/> This article, from a parent-and-child therapeutic consultation clinic in a medical and child-psychology center, deals with the mental processes that are called on or rejected during the course of parenting small children with mental handicaps. The experience of this parenting, so far from what they expected, confronts parents with a traumatic ordeal that is frequently worsened when the diagnosis is announced. This trauma affects the parents’ capacity for maternal reverie, leaving them and their young child vulnerable to a breakdown of narrative identity and rousing in them a need to seek symbolization. It is the therapist’s task to support the capacity of the mother’s psyche by accepting in his/her own mind her unsymbolized mental experience so as to help her expand it. This clinic should be thought of as a clinic for trauma, narrative identity, and symbolization. The article places in perspective the therapeutic value of the liaison processes activated by the narrative experience and the anti-traumatic and symbol-creating functions that it makes possible in this difficult act of parenting.