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Any explanation of HIV-infection confronts the child to fundamental questions such as origins, filiation, sexuality and death. HIV-infected parents perceive the advent of sexual activities in adolescence as an appropriate timing for revelation. As if the risk for contamination in the adolescent opens the chains of secret. The paper explores the possibility for the offspring to move away from the alienating and deadly ancestral order and occupy a new position in the family system through co-constructing a shared history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Miss" asked the president of the cour d'assises, addressing the eleven year old teenager Marina "Can you tell the court what happened when you discovered the inanimate body of your seven year old brother two years ago?" The frail young girl, her face turned towards the accused - her own mother - keeps silent. In the presence of her educator and of her psychologist, Marina will remain nearly silent, not only in the court, but even later, after her mother has been sentenced to several years in prison. The daughter of parents who had separated a few years before, born in a denial of pregnancy situation, Marina is the survivor of two children. Her younger brother, who died after an untreated lung disease, suffering from undernutrition, was found dead by his mother, in the presence of the little girl who thought the boy was asleep. For a week after the discovery, the mother, who lacked job security, kept on with a starting professional activity which she had long waited for. During this period of time, Marina remained silent in the children's bedroom with the hidden body of her dead brother. Considering her mother's denial of her own birth, and a possible denial of her brother's death by herself and partly the mother, we shall address the young girl's psychic trauma, which caused her partial mutism. As she then asked for, because of her relationship with her mother, Marina will be left in the care of her father, and will progressively come out of her mutism, however keeping the circumstances of the events a secret. The educative and therapeutic environment doubtlessly allowed the young girl to overcome the affective and psychic shock she had suffered at the time she was undernourished. In this particular case, respecting the child's partial mutism appeared to be the safeguard of her psychic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: Here we show an example of the possible favorable evolution of autistic features in a male child specifically treated by water contact, play dough and painting mediation. The first step of the treatment aimed at successively chasing away the primitive fears then “dissolving the autistic gate”. The second step aimed to make the patient able to use “projection” and “introjection” as first tools of defense in order to reach the symbolization process. Indeed, in the course of this therapy the child showed the ability to express the first signs of the possible traumatic experience which could have been generated by the physical separation from his mother, and was assumed to have originated the autistic symptoms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The author tries to think about the representations that help or not a managed care with sexually abused child. First, the article describes the experiences of the therapy of sexually abused child in the Reunion Island and in Agen (France). A clinical illustration shows the existence of other violence (psychic and physical), where the child is suffering of incestuous attack (it is not only the attack by biological father on the daughter). The author insists on two theoretical points of view to think the psychic traumatism: the nachträglich of Freud Sigmund or the fear of breakdown of D.W. Winnicott. The conclusion is that there is risk for the professionals: collapsus topique and psychosomatic disorganisation, two terms to explain many miscarriages of justice (Outreau, France). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: What is traumatic for the child in the experience of his disease is not only the somatic damage that hurts him but the harm (supposed or real, conscious or unconscious) he thinks he has done to his parents by being ill. This harm triggers a process of psychic elaboration, which the author defines as « harm work ». Signs of this work can be noticed in the speech of the ill child, in his games and drawings, and through his behaviour. Parents play an important role in the « harm work » of their child and they also have to undertake their own work. It is important to give psychological help to parents and to their ill child, in order to prevent and to limit some dysfunctions in their relationship, which may be related to the failure of the « harm work ». [Copyright &y& Elsevier]