À l’école, l’enfant migrant est confronté à un travail intense de symbolisation qui articule le vécu migratoire, le vécu familial et la disponibilité de l’environnement scolaire à l’accueillir au-delà de sa mission première d’enseignement. Cet article a pour but de montrer la complexité des processus en jeu dans la psyché de l’enfant et discute des aspects liés à la période de latence ainsi qu’aux problématiques interculturelles. L’étude est réalisée à partir de l’examen psychologique d’un enfant migrant de sept ans, rencontré dans le cadre scolaire. Ces rencontres ont eu lieu suite à des difficultés soulignées par l’école concernant cet enfant. Les données issues des entretiens avec la maîtresse, la mère et l’enfant révèlent l’incompréhension et la non-disponibilité psychique de la mère, la répétition de la défaillance d’étayage par l’école ainsi que l’effort de l’enfant pour symboliser l’expérience migratoire et prémigratoire. L’analyse révèle différents types de traversées : la traversée familiale, la traversée institutionnelle, la traversée projective qui imposent à la psyché un travail de réorganisation des vécus antérieurs. La discussion soulève certains enjeux migratoires de la période de latence ainsi que certains problèmes liés au changement de contexte culturel.

At school, the migrant child has to face an intense symbolization that articulates the experience of migration, the family past and the availability of the school environment to accommodate beyond its primary mission of education. Migration is a potential source of trauma. This article aims to show the complexity of the processes involved in the psyche of the child and discusses aspects of latency as well as intercultural issues.

The study was conducted on the psychological examination of a 7-year old migrant child that we met at school. The meetings took place because of difficulties for the child, highlighted by the school. The data are from interviews with the child’s teacher and the mother of the child, as well as the projective methods available to the child, the Rorschach test and the game Play Mobile. Both tools have been used as a method of investigation and as a support for mediation.

Media and projective interviews reveal the mother’s lack of understanding of behavioral problems of children. The mother appeared to be emotionally unavailable for her son. She had a lot of difficulty in containing him. As for the child, he tried to maintain the presence of an absent father, portrayed the story of his immigration and his growing awareness of the processes involved. The child invested the clinical relationship and expressed every effort to symbolize the experience of pre-migration and migration times.

The analysis reveals different types of passages: family passage, institutional passage, and projective passage that requires a mental reorganization of previous experiences. It appears that the environment is very important in the psychological construction of the child. The difficulty of investing school knowledge comes from a lack of evidence of his personal history. The discussion raises some issues of migration latency period as well as some problems with changing cultural context. To symbolize and build an intercultural Me, the migrant child needs to rely on stable environments.