ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author talks about how motor behaviours of a child can distort and obstruct the development of its Ego and the processes of emotional and social learning. Whoever is near the child is faced with a “deaf and dumb physicality”, apparently resistant to any concern or care, unavailable to any interaction or commonality. The recommendation of psychotherapy had come in the first instance from the nursery teachers who were worried by the severity of the child’s personal and social isolation, which, according to them, would make it impossible to insert him into a primary school class. The child becomes emotionally inaccessible, “deaf” to any suggestion to move towards greater motor or linguistic autonomy. There are other moments when there is a suspension of attention, when the child is completely absorbed by “painful” physical sensations, which are triggered by the incursion of an intense sensorial stimulus from the outside into his body.
