Psychotraumatisme, « réel de la mort » et travail psychique infantile sur la mort

In these clinical encounters, we can see that work on death with children is above all work on the links between life and death, which make a major contribution to the feeling of continuity of existence. Thus a matrix forms, and it will later enable the triggering of a process of symbolization, restoring the temporality to language, and enabling the subject to redefine the boundaries that the trauma has upset. Conversely, when this work cannot occur, most often as a result of a traumatic family history, we see the formation of the certainty of a death coinciding with the fall from the psychic space of the other, and thus with sheer annihilation. It is the re-emergence of these certainties at the time of an encounter with the reality of death that can lead to psychotrauma. The subject has undergone an intolerable identification process - since his or her non-existence, or the notion that he or she has always been dead, is confirmed - whether it takes the form of withdrawal of the other, or even the form of murder.