Les visites médiatisées

Abstract

Mediated visits are a setting which consists in having parents and their children meet in the presence of a third person, more often after a judicial decision. It is a complex clinical an theoretical means which aims at several purposes. 1) Allow to maintain a link with the parents while protecting the child. Mediated visits are indeed necessary each time that a child is in physical or psychic danger when he or she is in contact with one of his or her parents; 2) Avoid the invasion of the child by abandonment anxieties; 3) Observe and understand the parent-child relationship. It is often during such visits that narcissistic seduction relationships appear or, also, the way the child is “utilized” by the parents as a split off melancholic part of themselves, etc; 4) evaluate the persistent fragility of the child facing his parents or, on the contrary, his solidity. The technical setting of mediated visits is described in a precise way as well as the way in which, if they are prepared in a convenient way and if the child is attentively listened to, these visits can allow the child to perform a real psychic work.