Visualiser l’esprit de l’enfant : une généalogie de l’image en pédopsychiatrie.

Résumé Au cours des quarante dernières années, la vidéo est devenue un outil quasi quotidien pour la recherche et la clinique pédopsychiatriques. L’omniprésence des images en mouvement pose cependant des questions complexes d’un point de vue philosophique et historique : comment savoir ce qu’il se passe dans l’esprit du petit enfant ? En proposant une généalogie des images qui s’appuie à la fois sur l’histoire des sciences et sur l’histoire du cinéma, cet article tente de montrer comment serait née l’idée que l’observation vidéo pourrait permettre d’émettre des hypothèses sur ce que « pense » l’enfant. Les pratiques actuelles ont pour origine la conjonction de deux mouvements qui se développent à la fin du XIX e et au début du XX e siècles : l’essor des études sur l’enfant et l’intérêt scientifique croissant pour l’image en mouvement. Cette conjonction a contribué à l’émergence de deux traditions visuelles qui transmettent des conceptions culturelles sur l’enfant aujourd’hui encore et font dans ce sens partie de la construction d’une fiction sur l’esprit de l’enfant. Over the last forty years, video has become an almost ubiquitous tool in child psychiatric practice. The increasing presence of moving images poses difficult questions from a philosophical and historical perspective: how do we know what happens in the mind of the child? This paper addresses the question in inquiring into the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of video as a method for generating child psychiatric knowledge. It proposes a genealogy of moving images that draws on both the history of science and film history. The article sets out with a discussion of the work of the French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875) as a first historical example for an interest in employing chrono-photographic means for the electro-physiological study of emotions in children. I suggest that Duchenne's work points to an ambiguous position of the child in the late nineteenth century, constituting a figure of both identification and alterity. I then show how Charles Darwin's study of infants re-situates the child in an evolutionary perspective, now taking a pivotal position for the anthropological understanding of the human condition. Darwin's work spurred experimentation with babies and infants and led to a cultural preoccupation with theories of recapitulation, as I will illustrate with the research of the British physician Louis Robinson (1857–1928). Part and parcel of this development was an interest in visualizing and recording children in both scientific and popular culture. The chrono-photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and the 1895 film Repas de bébé by the Lumière brothers both testify to this new observational paradigm. I follow the paradigm into the twentieth century with the example of the filmic work of Arnold Gesell (1880–1961) that can be considered a precursor to current practices of video-based microanalysis. Finally, I present the point of view shot and the subjective camera as an alternative, or rather, a supplementary mode of visualization that seeks to understand the child's perspective through sympathetic insight. Films by Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) and recent scientific studies using eye-tracking methods will be set into this tradition. Overall, the paper argues that the crossroads of child studies and moving images at the turn-of-the-century have contributed to the emergence of two visual traditions that, until today, negotiate cultural ideas about the child, and, in this sense, participate in the construction of a fiction about the mind of the child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]