The Notion of the Perceptual Trace in the Understanding of Clinical Work with Children Manifesting Self-Destructive Behavior

The author proposes two clinical situations of children presenting symptoms which are the raw expression of perceptive traces (Pt) or mnesic traces (Mt) engraved in the neuropsychic apparatus and untranslated (un-transformed) because of a traumatism or because of a failure of the protective environment. These unelaborated primitive inscriptions constitute fueros or pockets inside the somato-psychic space where there is a tendancy for repetition of self-destructive discharges. The therapeutic situation helps, in its manner, to defuse the death drive. Since external reality does not invent anything and contributes nothing beyond perception itself, the child has recourse to what is in his imagination, to the organizers of psychic life, which he tends nonetheless to repress continuously : infantile sexual theories, the family history and primal fantasies. On the other side, the analyst uses his bodily counter-transference to make a translation possible and it takes place by linking the primitive traces to chains of associations already present in the unconscious and preconscious systems of the subject. Repression, which has become possible in these areas, once dominated by raw perceptive traces, is a witness to the work accomplished and the subject’s appropriation of his fueros.