France | Maroc | Hongrie | Pologne | Déficience
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ENVISAGEurope
Budapest - 2005)
SAE : ateliers Sculpture-Modelage
Partenaires : Ecole pour jeunes aveugles et malvoyants de Budapest
100CIBLEurope Budapest -
2008 (sous réserve)
SAE : ateliers Son & Image
Partenaires : Ecole pour jeunes aveugles et malvoyants de Budapest
Agnes Fazekas - Psychologist
National Congress of Hungarian Psychiatric Association
(January 2006)
(The original title plays on words, because „learning myself” and
„plaster clay” are the same in Hungarian.)
Tom is a 12-year-old, visual impaired, mentally disabled boy. His
mother
did not bother about him, so he went to the crèche and was
adopted at
the age of 3. Now he is a pupil of the Elementary School for Low Vision
Children in Budapest. He goes home fortnightly. He learns well, he is
usually a silent, uncommunicative boy, but sometimes he has a temper
tantrum and he breaks and crashes everything. He thinks that his face
is
very ugly, he feels ashamed of his features. If anybody makes fun of
him, he goes wild. I made play therapy with him once a week, for ten
months, and those hours really exhausted me. Tom could handle
everything
with fury. He could damage massive wooden houses. Toys would become
fragments in his hands. When he would find an empty paper box, he would
‘kill’ it literally. When we played together, he always was the
aggressor and I, the victim.
During my work with handicapped children I see them bursting into
agression, day after day, and I meet the different forms of
destructivity.
Impaired vision or other disabilities together with the parents’
narcistic wound cause a lot of damage in early mother-child attachment.
In addition, we must think about mental disorders of neglected, abused
and abandoned children. Their aggression comes from many sources, and
it
is a difficult task to find ways for solving the problem. I would like
to present a practicable way for it. Sophie Dalmon, a French sculptor,
held a workshop in the Elementary School for Low Vision Children last
autumn. She went round European specialised schools with this programme.
Her ENVISAGE project based upon modelling workshops, gives the young
blind and amblyopic the opportunity to realise a clay bust in their
image. Through artistic means and self-expression, ENVISAGE aims at
encouraging the young blind and amblyopic towards identity discovery,
autonomy and self-belief. Sensory impaired people often have a
fragmented vision of their own identity. Within a creative process of
self-portraiture, ENVISAGE workshops invite the participants to express
the speculative vision they have of their own face and personality.
Between the intimate world and the external environment, the face is
the
fundamental territory of human relationships. Through
self-portraitures,
the ENVISAGE workshops invite the young participants to affirm
themselves as active subjects of representation instead of passive
objects of the others’ look.
During this workshop in our school, children modelled their face with
clay. They made three different portraits. The first head reflected
their own features. The second one expressed the most important traits
of their personality, e.g. smiley, sporty, silent, etc. The third one
was their imagined ideal face. Before and after work they were talking
about how to show their face and personality, and how the sculptures
were going. Tom was one of the group, he was working with joy and
attention, his work became specially good. In the group, his aggression
disappeared.
The theoretical basis of this therapeutic practice would be interpreted
after Günter Ammon’s work and self-psychology too.
According to Ammon, people are social creatures, and between people
there is a social energy. It is based upon connections and
communication. Social energy is necessary for structuring and
developing
personality When the contact with others is too difficult (sensory
impaired persons, mental disorders, attachment disorders, family
problems), social energy becomes deficient and the development of
personality is disturbed.
According to Ammon, aggression is a central ego-function in the
unconscious seed of personality, one of the most important elements of
identity. Originally, aggression is a positive, constructive power, but
consequently to inadequate treatments of primary group (family), it
becomes destructive or deficient. One of the manifestations of
destructive aggression is the temper tantrum. Another central
ego-function is creativity which therapies must mobilise to elaborate
destructive aggression. Identity is one of the most important idea of
Ammon’s humanstructural personality theory, it is the organising centre
of personality. His therapy is milieu-therapy, because it uses the
social and natural environment for building identity.
Another possible theoretical basis is Daniel Stern’s concept. While
Ammon approaches this problem through a big “visual angle”, with a
social point of view, Stern uses “zoom”, he concentrates on
micro-processes. What does happen between a mother and her baby during
feeding and playing time ? What is the result if there is no touching,
no mirroring?
Stern supposes a centre of emotions, intentions and plannings, which
develops through interactions between the baby and its social
environment. When the visual canal is impaired, it makes the affective
tuning between baby and mother more difficult, and the developing of
self-feeling is difficult, too. Self-feelings have a special importance
in the day-to-day social interactions, if they are blocked up, the
personality has serious social deficit, so aggression and regression
appear in the behaviour.
According to Peter Fonagy the self is formed through others’ mirroring,
which contains child images. There is a close relationship between
attachment processes and the development of the capacity to envision
mental states in the self and others. If the mother can’t take care of
her child suitably, his self-organisation will become unstable, and he
will not have a good image of himself. Under optimal circumstances a
child learns to work with his emotions in a symbolic way. But if he has
a deformed image of himself, he is forced to use his emotions as a
device instead of signs. Destructive agression allows to experience
one’s self and one’s emotions.
Not only modelling clay busts make creativity - Ammon’s central
ego-function - stronger, but it also heps to build identity and to
experience the self. These children could only use a few visual
information, but working with their hands was a direct tactile method
for them. They had no optimal mirroring, neither physical nor
emotional.
During workshops they had the opportunity to look right in their own
face and they could make the best face for them . According to Ammon’s
milieu therapy, they would create clay, their own personality, a
collective adventure and a healing athmosphere at the same time.
A lecture presented a practicable way to treat the destructive
accumulated aggression of handicapped children which lead to important
individual and social experience. I would like to thank Sophie Dalmon
for her work and altruistic help."
Agnes Fazekas
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