Making the Best in a Bad Job: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Communication with Children and Adolescents with Severe Physical Conditions

Abstract

Ill children/adolescents who suffer from severe organic diseases have to cope with their inner experiences, therapies, and the global burden of the disease. Although sometimes depression, anger, and death anxiety are openly encountered in medical settings, other times they can be partially hidden by a reactive and defensive path. In these scenarios, psychoanalysis is challenged to contribute the best comprehension of the intimate communication, maybe hidden, and the needs of the ill patients to express themselves. The best way a child can talk about himself is through spontaneous creativity. The adult’s task is to facilitate the creation of an empty space and to recognize the child’s mode of communication. There may be intense emotional reactions that the adult has to tolerate to not move the patient towards an over-adaptation. These over-adaptations entail the child being forced to feel good or have fun, thereby causing them to escape from their inner experience. The loss of the child’s reality forms an additional burden to the child. The most valid indicator of this attitude is the ability to not take counterphobic attitudes but to allow the depression to be shared in a contact space between the child’s true self and the perceived environment.