L’objet de la consultation
The Object of the Consultation

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on child psychiatry and proposes psychoanalysis as a useful approach in understanding the child as a patient. The author highlights the fact that even before being an object of diagnostic evaluation, the child is an object for his parents and other adults who take care of him/her. Psychiatric evaluation may thus be facilitated by the Lacanian “mirror stage” and by the notion of object “little a”. Both findings have the potential to illuminate the particular position of a child as being an object for others and can consequently help the medical doctor allow the object of consultation to represent itself as such; that is to say, as a subject. Such a representation is particularly difficult in the case of autism. The author thus proceeds to shows how autism has put the idea of the object of diagnostic evaluation to the test.

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