Anthropologie & Santé ()

Le « Projet Jonathan ». Aménager un environnement autour d’un enfant porteur d’autisme

  • Véronique Servais

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropologiesante.5969
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 20

Abstract

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The text is a reflexive work on clinical care that was carried out by a team, to which the author belonged, with a child with autism, Jonathan. For three consecutive summers, Jonathan was taken to meet captive dolphins on a daily basis. This old work is presented anew in the light of Fernand Deligny's writings, discovered long after the project was completed, which allowed me to see it in a new light and to formalize what seemed to me until then to be unspeakable. The key element of the work with Jonathan is identified as the development, around and with the child, of a material, relational and symbolic environment whose particularities are to accept uncertainty and multiple narratives, to refrain from imposing a priori knowledge and thus to allow Jonathan to take a place within our team. Based on the notes taken during the project and on the echo given by my reading of Deligny's writings, this narrative identifies the salient features of this work, leading me to qualify the way of acting with Jonathan, "to act together in the 'unwilling'", a way of acting that tries to avoid, as much as possible, conscious purposes.

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