Child development therapy - What does this support consist of?

Child developmental therapy is a specific psychotherapeutic approach that takes into account the psychic dimension and the bodily dimension of each child.

 In developmental therapy, the therapist creates with the child a play space in which the child and the therapist will try to decode archaic emotional experiences. These experiences will take on their meaning in the relationship with the therapist.

Through play, sensory and motor experiences, plastic expression, language, and the relationship with the therapist, the therapist helps the child to build a clean, differentiated psychic space that will allow him to access more thought.

This work is done in close collaboration with the parent through regular interviews. We will talk about the evolution of the work in progress with their child, our thoughts and questions but also the observations that parents can make in everyday life.

However, "what happens in the session remains in the session" because the therapist is bound to secrecy vis-à-vis the child. This will allow the child to experience "the difference between the outside and the inside, that what the child brings intimate in this space remains intimate".

 

The objective of Child Development Therapy

The objective is for the child to be able to experience his motor skills in a space and a time of exchange and connection in order to expand his thinking apparatus and build his own mental container.

The narcissistic and objective reinvestment which passes through the activity of the body supports the construction of the bodily self and allows mental elaboration to resume its course. Symbolic thinking can then develop through the emergence of fantasy scenarios that will be supported in their development.

“In development therapy, the therapist builds with the child play space, a transitional area. In this relationship, it offers him the opportunity to experience the work of the game, to discover new perceptual and sensor motor experiences.

These experiences are supported by the understanding of the psychic functioning of the child as well as by awareness, by the therapist, of the various transfers-counter-transferential movements.

The work in developmental therapy calls on the therapist for his creativity, his bodily mode of being, and his capacities for thought. The work is therefore based on knowledge of the development of the child, of the psychic mechanisms which underlie any therapeutic relationship, and refers to psychoanalytic theory.