Dessin du personnage dans le processus démentiel : une certaine idée de l'espace psychique

The ability to elaborate a representative model is crucial to the process of apprehending the world and its spatial structure. Numerous publications have discussed this process in children. In the field of developmental psychology, Piaget's papers on spatial representations are a reference. From a psychoanalytical point of view, the successors of Klein and Bion, especially Meltzer, pinpoint the importance of mental space and its role in organizing thought via the concept of spatial capacity. What does this mean in the vulnerable situation of dementia affecting the integrity of the psyche itself? Here, we discuss these questions in the clinical situation of aging, starting with ontogenesis and using Freudian and Lacanian paradigms. Our goal was to highlight several elements of the psychic transformation resulting from the destructive process of dementia in search of a potentially useful psychotherapeutic approach. We show how drawings of the human figure can be helpful as a tool for mediation and for analysis of intra- and interpsychic human encounters.