Gabrielle Douieb, PhD Student, Paris Descartes University, France

Marion Feldman, Researcher, Paris Descartes University, France

In France, according to an ONED study(2014), 9,8‰ of children under 18 are in foster care. A lot of these children have grown up in dysfunctional families and suffered from mistreatments.
It has been decided to put them in foster care in order to protect them, but parental separation does have consequences on their development and mental state (Berger, 1997; David, 2004 ; Rottman, 2009, Bonneville, 2015). Moreover, their foster care history is full of discontinuities and separations.
In this work, my goal is to interview 7 to 10 year old children in foster care, using several media: semi directive interviews, drawings,  » tale test » (De Tichey, 1993), games, to investigate their representations of the concept of separation. I am studying how parental separation is represented, how past and present separations are perceived by the child and how working with them on this concept is very important in order to help them during their development.
Furthermore, I make the hypothesis that the primary separation is reactivated in the transference-counter transference process between the child and the clinician.

References:

De Tichey, C. (1993), Test des contes et clinique infantile, Paris, In Press
Berger, M. (1997), L’enfant et la souffrance de la séparation, Paris: Dunod.
Bonneville-Baruchel, E. (2015), Les traumatismes relationnels précoces-Clinique de l’enfant place, Toulouse : Eres.
David, M. (2004), Le placement familial de la pratique à la théorie, (5ème ed) Paris: Dunod.
Rottman, H. & Richard, P. (2009), Se construire quand même, Paris: PUF.

Key Words: Foster Care, Separation, Representation, Fear of death, transference