The European Association of Psychopathology Child and Adolescent

The European Association of Psychopathology Child and Adolescent (AEPEA) is a scientific association whose objective is to enhance the psychopathological axis of the practical and theoretical reflection in psychology and psychiatry of the baby, the child and adolescent.Founded in 1996, it aims to make known the most recent studies and scientific advances in the field of baby psychopathology, child and adolescent health, to promote research multidisciplinary and international psychopathology, to facilitate international collaborations in the fields of education and training in child psychotherapy and adolescents and to help authorities of European states to these questions. The European Association for Child Psychiatry and Adolescent (AEPEA) was born of a desire to promote a model of psychopathological understanding, both in our clinical practice, therapy with children in our theoretical research. This model is, for us, even opening wearer forcefully affirmed certain principles that we propose to recall. Psychopathology takes primarily designed to study the system of internal representations of the child, its functioning, their logic, their sequence and their meanings. It postulates and any child, regardless of the severity of his condition, carries its own psychic life and that his illness is inside a system with its own internal coherence and organizes relational terms the child. Psychopathology affirms the existence of a double continuity of mental life: Continuity in the psychic life of the subject, between the normal and the pathological. What Freud had seen and explained in "  The Psychopathology of Everyday Life  " in 1901. temporal continuity that emphasizes the link between on the one hand, some archaic forms of mental relationship or operation or some experienced early and, secondly, the current mental organization of the child. Psychopathology also emphasizes the weight of individual history, on the constraints of the past and the transgenerational inheritance in the genesis of mental disorders. Psychopathology is the study of interpsychic link established between the child and his parents nature of projections, investments, phantasmal scenarios shared between them. If psychopathology is never causalist, it does not grant less a role in the evolutionary course of the disease that is played between parents and children through this link.Psychopathology puts the child in the socio-educational context. It takes into account the multiple forms of social environment deficiencies or weight of events that mark the life of the child. However, it gives less importance to the traumatic nature of the event and the impact that has the meaning of the event in the psyche of the child, as well as how it is reorganizing the waning of this experience. Psychopathology is primarily sensitive to the analysis of psychic functioning and the consideration thereof in therapeutic strategies. The use of psychotropic medications in children and adolescents should be part of this global vision. It is in this perspective that psychopathology help to better understand the impact of psychotropic drugs on psychological processes. Psychopathology is not unifiable nor in terms of the method or epistemologically. It does not propose a unique model of reference, although the psychoanalytic model is an essential reference. In its diversity, psychopathology should remain immune to the risks of dogmatism and confinement in set theories that would invalidate its action. Psychopathological approach does not neglect other aspects of psychiatric knowledge. She did not underestimate the interest of models from discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology and genetics. Nor does it disregards the interests of cutting nosographic, even though it is rather a transnosographic perspective that leads to delimit its own fields of investigation and knowledge objects. Psychopathology is also a practice. Theoretical models it offers build on this practice while they nourish. Psychopathology allows everyone to be a personal representation, not reducing, the child, his concerns, expectations and possibilities to accommodate the therapeutic input. Psychopathology is a theoretical and practical tool alive, dynamic and open to external contributions to apprehend mental functioning in its complexity and diversity.