Répression des pleurs comme traumatismes relationnels précoces

Abstract

What to make of very young children's crying remains largely misunderstood and this topic is often neglected during the training of early childhood professionals. Linking this omission to a form of infantile amnesia, we start with the hypothesis that for the very young, dissociation is a primitive adaptation strategy related to attunement with a dissociative state in the parent. These early dissociative states appear in infants’ maturing brains when the adult care-giver does not respond to the infants’ emotional needs during repeated critical periods of crying while the child's attachment system is activated. Thusly, when the adult's reaction to the very young child's crying is to repress it, a chronic traumatic prototypic situation occurs in which we can witness in the infant, a repeated absence of the ability to regulate the intensity and duration of distress. We shall see how the genesis of these early traumas can, from a phenomenological point of view, put the notion of dissociation into question. While no longer considering it as only a defensive action system, an alternative hypothesis would be to consider the dissociative phenomena as an expression of repetition of early experiences in pathological relationships. This phenomenological reflection invites an epistemological debate in order to put into dialectical perspective different theoretical fields referring to dissociative phenomena. In closing, we shall discuss the importance of exploring infantile crying with adults who suffer from dissociative disorders.