Family as narrated by homeless children and adolescents: fiction as support for desire

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the family representation in oral fiction narratives produced by one child and one adolescent, both homeless. Lacan-oriented psychoanalysis served as a theoretical perspective for the analysis. Moreover, the fiction narrative discourse is considered to be configured as a privileged locus for the emergence of subjectivity. Particularly in this modality of discourse, the subject truth breaks out in absence; one talks about himself because he cannot escape his dependence upon the language. What seems to distinguish these narratives is the emergence of a relationship between what is empirical and what is idealized. Along with the representation of a disarranged family (absent parent figures, reassembles, neglectful parents), comes the representation of a happy united family. It can be concluded that through fiction these subjects organized their private simbolization of what a family is, guided essentially by desire.