Where do drawings come from? Our first graphic traces in childhood and the re-volt of the historian self

Abstract

This essay explores the graphic and psychological development of a child through drawing, in a process shared with his father over five years. Drawing on everyday practice, the author intertwines his experience as a father, artist, and candidate for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, linking the emergence of children’s graphic marks with Piera Aulagnier’s concept of the Historian Ego and Julia Kristeva’s concept of Re-volt. The author reflects on the relationship between the dimensions of psychic representation, graphic marks, and subjectivity, showing how graphic representation can become an intermediary space between the inner world and shared reality, fostering psychic structuring. Similarly, graphic representation in childhood can function as a series of supports upon which subjectivity can rely in its work of generating its own history, in the task of constructing an Ego. Thus, the text attempts to be both an intimate testimony and a theoretical essay on the transmission of identifications between generations through stories, visual practices and shared emotions, accounting for artistic practice as an activity that generates new meanings, intersubjective encounters, processes of construction and psychic transformation.