Accessibilité à la scolarisation et capacité de mentalisation de l'enfant autiste d'âge scolaire

Abstract

This paper, entitled “Accessibility to schooling and the ability of the autistic child of school age to mentalize”, starts from the observation that, despite the adoption of innovative legislative and regulatory measures over school enrollment of mentally handicapped for more than ten years, there is still a significant delay in the approach to pervasive developmental disorders such as autism and makes it difficult to detect not only the schooling of the autistic child, but also the educational accompaniment. However, the education of autistic children involves the acquisition of benefits in cognitive, language acquisition, social development and motor skills development. These benefits can only be realized if these children are developed with the ability to communicate with others, to participate in social interactions, otherwise they run the risk of isolation. However, it is important to note that the autistic child does not lack a desire for interaction and / or emotionality, or even that he or she does not have extreme shyness towards the other, but he lacks the possibility to interact due to the lack of adequate social adaptation. He experiences the experience of a group divided from the inside into the class group whereas a specific schooling that takes into account the particularities of each child influences his socio-adaptive capacities and consequently his ability to mentalize. The objective of the study is to see how the accessibility of schooling affects the ability of the autistic child of school age to mentalize. More specifically, our work aims to examine whether the participation in individual and collective learning, the integration of cognitive content and the acceptance of the constraints of schooling influences the ability of the autistic child of school age to mentalize. In order to verify the achievement of these objectives, the research was done in a sample of five autistic children of school age that we obtained by applying the reasoned sampling technique. An observation grid covering six (06) axes namely: the work of the autistic learner in the classroom; the knowledge acquisition; life according to the standards of the school, communication; The responses and understanding and finally the somatization and its abandonment (Refusal of response to somatic types), allowed us to collect data which were analyzed through the psychoanalytic approach of content analysis. The results obtained after processing the data reveal that the implementation of the cognitive instruments necessary for solving school tasks requires a confrontation of representations not only between pupils but also between teachers and pupils concerning these tasks in order to construct a common definition. The results of our study show that some subjects with autism can succeed in some tasks of the theory of mind and hence they show an ability to mentalize. These results enabled us, at the end of our work, to raise some questions for future work.