Sémiotique de l’action chez les auteurs de violences sexuelles et non sexuelles

RésuméObjectifCette étude vise à comprendre le fonctionnement psychique d’un sujet ayant commis un passage à l’acte délictuel sexuel et non sexuel, selon le niveau de conscience de son acte et la qualité de son appropriation subjective, dans une approche croisant les champs de la linguistique et de la psychologie clinique.MéthodeUne situation d’énonciation générée par un remaniement de la consigne du subtest Arrangement d’Images de la WAIS-R a été proposée : « raconter une histoire ». Cette procédure est appliquée à 80 sujets masculins mis en examen pour passage à l’acte délictueux et expertisés, répartis en deux groupes, infraction sexuelle et infraction non sexuelle. Les textes, analysés avec des outils empruntés à la linguistique énonciative et cognitive et la pragmatique du langage, ont été rassemblés en trois constellations signifiantes différentes traduisant la conscience qu’un sujet a de son acte : partielle, totale ou absente, conscience dépendant du registre du fonctionnement psychique.RésultatsUne approche sémiologique de l’agir – geste immotivé, comportement impulsif et conduite intentionnelle finalisée – est dégagée, éclairée sous l’angle de la psychopathologie clinique.

This study is situated at the meeting point of linguistic and clinical psychology fields. It attempts to find a link between the nature of a narrative and pragmatic structure of a discourse and the mental system of a subject who committed a criminal act.ObjectiveThe understanding of an offender's relationship with his act, from the perspective of his level of conscience and the quality of his subjective appropriation.MethodForty sexual offenders and forty non-sexual offenders are examined in the context of a psychological expertise with an original method using the tools of the WAIS-R “Arrangement d’Images”, an iconic material. The subject is asked to “tell a story” so as to come up with a particular initial situation. The database of this study is the totality of these 800 stories. The texts are analysed according to two narrative and pragmatic axis with tools taken from the enunciative linguistic, the cognitive linguistic, the pragmatic of the language and the semiotic of action. The structure of these texts is based on a “description – story” axis. They are identified in different types of stories: ocular evidence, act of evidence and evidence of a witness. The narrative-pragmatic modalities of the declaration, studied under the aspects of the temporality, the logic and the action, are written down in a specifically built analysis grid. These modalities are gathered in meaningful clusters that convey three distinctive ways of seeing the subjective link of the subject towards his act: a meaningful cluster for his perplexity, a second one for his lucidity, and a third one for his minimization.ResultsWith a semiological approach of the acting and through the clinical psychopathology viewpoint, it becomes possible to classify the subjects in three groups and to understand and differentiate an unmotivated act, an impulsive behaviour and a finalised intentional behaviour: the subject's capacity to understand the aim and finality of an act: motivation, project, planning; the subject's capacity to conceive a series of successive and coordinated actions, adjusting the method as the opportunities come by but without prior intention, indicate an impulsive and opportunist functioning without elaborating a cognitive strategy; the subject's incapacity to understand the situation as a whole, the absence of a clear motivation to carry out the act, the presence of unmotivated acts, the uncontrollable tropism towards the object or the sensory source.