Some Indications Toward a Phenomenologically Oriented Approach to Child Neuropsychiatry

Abstract

In the clinical practice of child neuropsychiatry one observes from the day of birth a process involving the development of the personality, i.e., a progressive integration and structuring of the ego in relation both to itself and to the external world. In following this process and its possible distortions (contingent and transitory or defmitive and irreversible, organic and/or psychogenetic) several different parameters are utilized. Among these are (1) neuropsychological studies which permit the understanding or, in some cases, the relatively exact defiinition of relations between the instrumental (gnosticpraxis and relational) and the neurobiological substratum, with particular attention to expressive functions (gesture, graphic, and verbal); (2) genetic psychology (above all of Piaget) which defmes important deductive reference points inherent in the progressive development of the appreciation of space and time, the principle of causality, and the progressive modalities of the development of thought in young children, under its representative and symbolic aspects; (3) psychoanalytic approach with reference to the various stages of emotional development, to the progressive topical and structural organization of their needs and the dynamic modalities of their reciprocal relations; (4) phenomenological analysis, which is certainly not the least important but which has remained until now, the least explored.