The Child "after": between maternal Depression and Transmission of the traumatism

Born a little time after the death of his sister, our patient, Antoine, 13 years old, was suffering from severe obsessional compulsive disorders, which needed care in the hospital and adapted treatment. We tried to know if what we were led to observe by this adolescent could be explained by works and thoughts around the notion of substitute child. Building our thought on various theoretical approaches, including neurosciences, we tried to think the psychopathological signs of this patient by two ways. One is about the birth and the growth in the presence of depressed parents, and this since the pregnancy. The other one is about the necessity to deal with the traumatic story of the family, met by the parents, who are still facing it, that leads to the question of the transmission of the traumatism from the mother to the baby. Using the notion of maternal primary care, we proposed the term 'the child after', which appeared to us more able to represent the dynamic and the place really given to these children. This term could mean the question of an undone grief, a traumatism without temporality, and a relation between the mother and the child which seems to be uncertain because of the investment of the child as an impossible reparation of an unscarred loss.