Contes et médiation symbolisante chez l'enfant présentant des difficultés sévères d'apprentissage

Abstract

This study concerns the development of symbolisation in children aged eight to nine years old who were followed up in a group workshop based on the reading of tales. Those children were in a special education school because of learning difficulties, although they were not psychotic nor mentally retarded. Projective tests (TAT or CAT) were administered to those children before and after the tales workshop as well as to a group of control children who did not take part in the workshop. The pretest revealed important symbolisation difficulties. However, some developments appeared at the post-test in the stories of the children who took part in the workshop, quantitatively (an increase of narrative forms) as well as qualitatively (emergence of doubt, of a temporal organization, of references to the internal space). Besides that, we also noticed an evolution in some of the formal and structural components of the drawings made by the children in the process of the workshop. Those signs suggest a transformation of the internal space, which seems to go along with the hypotheses of authors such as Boimare with respect to the relationship between fear of internal objects and fear of learning, and also with respect to the transitional role that tales and myths might play in children who are confronted with such fears.