ABSTRACT
Children in a state of psychic retreat though, do not act out their impulses and fears, nor do they express their conflicts through symbolic acts, whether externalized or internalized. A. Slade argues that with acting-out or impulsive children, the language has to first become what Piaget has called, a system of "signifiers," which is a system of symbolic signs that is disconnected from bodily and primitive impulses. Psychoanalysts have used terms like "psychic deadness", state of "non-experience", state of "foreclosure" and "psychic retreat" to describe adult patients who experience themselves in various degrees of isolation and disengagement in life. M. Milner believes that when words fail to communicate the person's reality, when contact is restricted or completely abrogated, the only way for a person's psychic reality to be communicated is through symbols and metaphors. The use of symbols and metaphors, the willingness to encourage and process such acts of communication, is a poetic act.
