Place and practice of TPCF in périnatalité (before and after birth)
Elisabeth Darchis (Bois-Colombes, France) and Denis Mellier (Lyon, France)
If joint mother-baby or father-baby therapies have existed for several decades in Europe (Doumic, Bick, Debray, Lebovici, Cramer, Stern, Golse, Palacio, Daws…), TPCF in périnatalité that are inspired by the work of Bion, Winicott, and group and family psychoanalysts have been in practice for less time. They affirm their insertion and intensify their theorizations since the nineties in France and other European countries or in Quebec (Carel, Darchis, Maffre, Mellier, Arpin…). In perinatal psychoanalytic therapy, several generations are present: the parental couple with the baby in utero or the newborn and the grandparents as well as the siblings. It is not the father, mother or child who are privileged in this work, but the subject-family as a whole.
This neonatal groupality contained by the therapy framework favors the psychic journey necessary for the construction of the new family group, with the essential regression and the indispensable resumption with the ancestral material . The reunions with old group experiences, the phantasmatic resonance with internal groups, the increase in the non-verbal modality of communication , the sharing of dreams as a family and their associations, the clarification about reciprocal couple and family collusions, go ” “to resubmerge” the future parents and the family group towards their roots and towards the fusion of origin, to then reinstall the ancestral material and progressively build the group memory of the new generational link.
The family psychic apparatus is thus tested, as in other circumstances, by this new distribution of family dynamics, which redistributes cathexes; Conflicts, identity problems and the very foundations of the unconscious organization of family life now reappear. This anchoring in the common psyche will open the way for the new group to support it and allow it to build a new family envelope, a true psychic cradle to welcome the child .
The early approach to the nascent family group through networks of psychic care in connection between somatic doctors and family psychoanalysts (TFP) proves to be effective in this period of fertile perinatal family crisis and sensitive to disorders. In this organizing step of a generation, psychoanalytic therapeutic capacity helps déconstruction – reconstruction in what is at stake of psychic transmission between generations, in particular, in the transformation of catastrophic childhood experiences, primitive family sufferings, transgenerational traumas , ancestral shames or family secrets that can return in what must be called a generational après-coup .
The work of symbolization and group psychic elaboration allows us to escape from the repetitions and generational confusion that tend to mistreat family ties due to a telescoping of generations . The TPCF in perinatality carry out true prevention, in the sense that they accompany the family group, taking it away from family “traumatosis” and confusing parenting towards a differentiation of generations.
Thanks to the introjection of therapeutic capacity, parents resume the pleasure of dreaming about the new family that can finally build its own family psychic apparatus and its family novel.
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