Argument

The body, spring and potential space of individual being, is at the same time the most intimate, the most exposed, and the least controllable part of the personal identity. Between the biological body, organized by the physiological rules, the psychic body, master and tool of the construction of the Self, and the social body, object of the human passions, complex interactions draw the unstable lines of normality and pathology, health and disease, pleasure and pain, love and hate, freedom and alienation, life and death.

The body, as borderline concept between somatic and psychic, escapes all these dialectics. The difficulty to think and especially to articulate its various dimensions, between organ, image and sensation, may explain the relative discretion of the topic of the body in the multidisciplinary reflections.

The body of the baby, of the child, of the teenager, embodies the stakes of the processes of psychomotor development, of identity construction, of psychosexual integration, of social appropriation ; so is the body profoundly, and variously, affected : fundamentally, in the fact that « affects », emotions and feelings, emerge in its sensibility, at the same time as it is invested by the affection, ambivalent and anguished, of the parents ; inevitably, because it is with this body that takes place the adventure of life, experiencing the small and big disappointments and successes of growing ; accidentally, every time its particularities, its dysfunctions, its failures, its wounds, its diseases, its « affections », and the care they determine, register their mark in the relationships of the child towards its body, the others and on the social institutions.

This congress would like to meet the challenge of confronting this polymorphic body, of the baby, the child, the teenager, with the diversity of the practices of care, from maternal concern to invasive surgery, from psychoanalytical psychotherapy to institutional interventions ... We wish to pay a particular attention to the way the experiences of the adults, the parents, the nursing teams, the psychotherapists, the pediatricians, the surgeons, the teachers, reflect the stakes expressed by the body languages, and allow to favor their outcomes.

Next to a reflection on the practices of care, the topics of the professional training, but also the place of the associations and the parents will catch our attention.