The joint production of the drawing of a family: an interactional story

Abstract

The interpretation of drawings made by school‐age children is a classic study field in child psychology. Yet clinical psychologists and researchers in psychology have concentrated more on analysing the semiotic value of a drawing made by the child. The authors of this paper offer an original approach to this graphic realisation, which consists of simultaneously calling upon two siblings and filming this collaborated production of a drawing of the family. Through the example of the negotiation about the parents’ sizes, the authors underline the relevance of the filming which enables them to grasp the story of the drawing as a dynamic production, in which the divergences in representations and the interactional process underlying this construction are revealed.

Keywords:

• drawing of the family
• joint activity
• intermediary object
• interaction
• gender

Notes

1. The original version of this article ‘La production conjointe d’un dessin de famille: un histoire interactionelle’ was published in Bulletin de Psychologie, 61(3), 2008.

2. However, the reader can refer to note 6.

3. We would like to thank Jean‐Charles Hautecouverture for his precious help.

4. They made possible the following analyses; thank you Elodie Petesch and Géraldine Jeannot for the quality of your work.

5. Let us point out, alongside this analysis, that the use of personal pronouns is recurrent all along the session, referring sometimes to real figures, sometimes to represented figures. They are quite often accompanied by the pointing at the drawing by means of finger, hand, tracing side of the pencil or non‐tracing side of it. Each time, this difference between the referents to these personal pronouns (real figures vs. represented ones) refers to questions of responsibility of both children towards the representation modes. This could be the object of a specific study about the link between the production of the graphic form and the children’s co‐responsibility towards the intra‐family symbolic of this drawing.

6. Here we have another recurrent observation: everything seems to point to the fact that the tracing and erasing instruments were tied to their representation. The only time Emma intervened in a concrete way on her brother’s drawing (to finish the arm stretched towards the mother to be done), she did it by grabbing her brother’s pencil to drop it in the split of a second later to draw the mother’s hand.

7. It is obvious that, for us, the event in its particular nature is a subject for a scientific study. This being said, we do not follow literally Bachelard’s quotation, which headed this text. According to us, one should not be confined by a singular approach. We herewith propose a path in relation with the production of children’s drawings, which could (admittedly not an easy task) fit a study supported by a large number of data and consequently by a statistical treatment.