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8001.More information
School-failure and the Medical Point of View.In this article, we analyse what part scientific discourse and medico-psychological practice dealing with mentally-deficient children owes to the social conditions of their production.The emergeance, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, of new types of "abnormal children" — the unstable and the retarded — is directly linked to the massive entry, as a result of educational requirements, of children from the lowest segments of the popular classes. The early specialists in child-psychology work out scientific representations of these "abnormal schoolchildren" and press for the establishment of specialized structures, adapted to their care. The success of this project is approved by a law of 1909 creating classes for further training. But this legal victory will have no institutional effects throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is only with the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when a system of diversified institutions is being established to care for different groups of malad- justed infants (delinquents, psycho-neurotics, low-grade or middle-grade mental defectives, and so on) that the classes for further training will begin to develop whilst specializing exclusively in the education of the "backward" (now termed, under the new psychological nomenclature, the slightly retarded). The field of maladjusted infancy, grouped around different bodies of specialists (child-psychiatrists, psychiatric hospital doctors, infant psychoanalysts, psychologists, specialized teachers), occasionally clashing over the concepts of maladjustment and therapeutic practices, was dominated up until the end of the sixties by the child-psychiatrists who were to occupy the key positions in the new institutions outside State Education (Safeguard of infancy and adolescence, medical teaching Institutes, Rehabilitation Centres for the psycho-neurotic). It is their word which is law and determines the limits of intervention of the other specialists (psychoanalysts are confined within caring for minor disorders, doctors of mental hospitals are relegated exclusively to the caretaking of the lowest-grade mental deficients).The new concepts relating to maladjustment elaborated by the child-psychiatrists combine with an eclectic discourse elements originating from different disciplines (genetics, experimental psychology, genetic psychology, psychoanalysis), by organising them in such a way as to establish on "scientific" bases a causal relationship between maladjustment and risk of delinquency. Mentally-defective infants are no longer characterized by the level of their intellectual deficiency but as "personalities totally deficient" (intellectual backwardness, psychomotor and affective deficiency, inability to conceive abstractly) whose psychic fragility is the dominant trait. Threatened by the social surroundings, the young mental defectives are deemed to be "in moral danger" by virtue of their being retarded.If child-psychiatrists still exert today a determining influence in certain institutions of the field of enquiry and if the concepts that they have elaborated are still current in a large part of the institutional System (and notably in the teaching profession), their dominant position was called into question, towards the end of the sixties, by a new line of enquiry which was psychoanalytically-oriented. It was by critieizing the notion of mental deficiency and the intractable nature of specialized teaching that the analysts tended to tear themselves a way from the auxiliary situation which had been assigned to them until then.Theoretically displacing mental retardation into the field of psycho-neuroses, they replace at the same stroke backward children within the potential clientele of the psychotherapies they practice within their institutions (medical-teaching centres, day-hospitals, and so on). By so doing, they enter into direct competition with the child-psychiatrists who had until then monopolised the clientele of the mentally retarded, judged moreover unanalysable by the masters of psychoanalysis until then.The confrontation between analysts and child-psychiatrists seems to resolve in favour of the latter, since the state authorities take up in official texts the nosographic categories prevalent in modem analytical discourse , relegating the child-psychiatrists ' categories to tradition. Thus the notion of psychoneurosis as implying a deficit takes over from that of mental deficiency, and here the analysts are merely taking over where the child-psychiatrists left off in the psychological retranslation of a strictly social phenomenon such as failure at school in children from the working classes, a resuit of the distance separating the culture of the family milieu from the arbitrariness of the dominant culture. The analysts are merely replacing the neuropsychiatrists but by their therapeutic practice they broaden the social reference of the institutions of the field of enquiry since, in accordance with their theory, they are led to seek in the symbolic economy of the family nucleus the elements that might determine the infant's failure at school. From failure at school viewed as a symptom of the child's suffering, we move on to the child as a symptom of some malady within the family, and in that case it is in the family that one must intervene directly through those institutional dynamics. A massive psycho-therapeutic caretaking of the most culturally tinderprivileged families tends to establish itself. Psychoanalysis of the poor tends to develop at the same time as the power of the analysts asserts itself within the field of maladjusted childhood, where it still encounters a certain number of obstacles of which one of the lesser is not the shunning by the more working class families of analytical questionning.
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8004.
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8005.
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8008.
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8009.More information
Research Framework : The general challenge and originality of this thematic issue of the journal Enfances Familles Générations consists in jointly exploring two major social transformations brought about by the integration of animals into families : the first transformation being in human families and the second in human-animal relationships. Objectives : The purpose of this introduction to the thematic issue "The Place and Impact of Animals in Families" is to present the current state of knowledge on the subject, by characterizing the approaches taken and identifying blind spots and how to address them. Methodology : The article is based on a review of the literature and an analysis of approximately 100 English- and French-language publications in the social sciences and humanities that focus on the place and impact of animals in families. Results : The first part of the article is devoted to an analytical presentation of the literature. Three principal methods of integrating animals into families can be identified in the works studied : integration, assimilation and substitution. In addition, two types of approaches have been favoured to date on how to understand the family in its relationship with animals : "fixist" and flexible. The second part of the article develops a critical analysis of this research. We show that, taken as a whole, these studies generate a naturalization effect of the very specific zoological, sociological and spatio-temporal realities studied. We show that this naturalization is linked to the ill-considered use of certain semantic categories ("companion animal," "family pet" or simply "pet") 1 . It is also linked to particular systems for the production of sociological knowledge on the place of animals in families (based in part on data provided by key players in the pet industry, or created on a pointedly moral foundation). Conclusions : The article underlines the need to develop and implement a genuine sociology of family/animal relationships that, on the one hand, more candidly assumes the implicit biases that have guided research to date (a clear positioning in relation to the three methods of integrating animals into families), and on the other hand seeks to denaturalize the categories it uses while questioning the knowledge systems within which it is embedded. Contribution : Beyond a critical and problematized interpretation of the literature, this article outlines several lines of research that aim to complete and rebalance the particular image that the current literature on the dynamics of integrating animals into the family provides. Five lines are identified : (1) the symbolic construction of the integration of animals into the family (artistic and media representations, construction of categories) ; (2) the physical conditions of this integration (role of technical objects, markets) ; (3) the role of animals in the construction of the identity and socialization of families ; (4) the uses of learned and secular discourses on animal families to define and legitimize a model of human families ; (5) a sociological redefinition of the family, taking into account the different types of animal integration.
Keywords: animaux, famille, sociologie, relations anthropozoologiques, animal studies, intégration, assimilation, substitution, animals, family, sociology, anthropozoological relationships, animal studies, integration, assimilation, substitution
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