When the Child Frees Up of Our Past / Quand l'enfant nous délivre du passé

Etty Buzyn is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst. Trained by Fran?oise Dolto, she has worked with parents and young children for many years and is the author of numerous works on parent-child relations. All families unconsciously transmit their history. A new baby is both the bearer and divulger of that history. Its birth enables the parents to project themselves into the future, but it also makes their past resurface. A birth reawakens the family's past: its joys and sometimes its sorrows. When welcoming a new baby in their midst, the parents, as well as their close friends and relatives, are obliged to re-evaluate their own childhood history, and the journey back to the past may reactivate old suppressed dramas - or, on the contrary, put them to rest. A child suffering from behavioural disorders, because of the failure to establish early maternal ties, manifests this family history. When treating the child the therapist also treats the mother, by addressing the ties that failed to be woven together in the mother's own childhood, in order to finally put an end to the repetitive scenarios, dramas and trauma. Based on the case histories of children she has treated, as well as on her own history, Etty Buzyn introduces us to the idea of family archaeology. It is by understanding what our history takes us back to and by revealing the heritage we have received that we will be able to answer the questions: what am I? Why and how did I come about? This book will incite readers to unravel and re-weave the threads of their own history.