A clínica psicanalítica com crianças: da adaptação à solução em referência ao sintoma

Abstract

The main idea of this study is to highlight the transformations that came to psychoanalytic practice with children from the Lacans orientation, which emphasizes the symptom and its relation to the instinctual dimension at the expense of social adaptation. It is considered that the adaptationist perspective of the clinic with children is a deviation promoted by some conceptual inflections, especially Freuds postulation of death instinct in 1920. Thus, we attempted to demonstrate that the use of adaptation, prioritized by the children psychoanalysts, who stood in the psychoanalytic movement, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, at that time, led to disregard the instinctual dimension of the symptom. In clinical practice with children, according to these authors, there is a removal from the clinical symptoms as a production of the unconscious, in order to minimize what, in the child, was going in the opposite direction of education and the social project. From the reading of the productions of the two theoretical psychoanalysts of children it is possible to highlight the therapeutic approach that is headed for the social adaptation. Anna Freud proposes a clinic essentially focused on an educational bias. Melanie Klein, in turn, initially anchors its practice in Freuds psychoanalytic foundations, and then formulates her own theory. At first, in her work, it is possible to isolate some considerations of what is proposed in this study as an adaptation of the symptom. It is known that, later, the instinctual dimension was privileged by Melanie Klein. But her early formulations did not fail to influence those who practice clinical psychoanalytic treatment with children up to the present day. Moreover, in the second stage of Melanie Kleins contribution, the theoretical framework, based on the theory of object with emphasis on completeness, seems to hide the importance of the theory of instincts. Finally, this paper tries to show that Lacans orientation, organized by the Jacques Lacans students in the 1960s, reintroduces effectively the articulation of the symptom to the instinct. The aphorism recommended by Robert and Rosine Lefort, according to which the child is an analyser in full rights, is what mobilized a radical change in clinical practice with children in which the adjustment has no more room. The reference to the symptom in this clinic presents itself as a solution to the person, whose manifestation is imposed as a condition of psychoanalytic practice: it is about to interrogate him or her to get to the inside of each person. Since then, it is the symptom as a solution that transforms itself in any form of adaptation