FELIPE, Sandra S.R. (1997) – A contribuição do Teste de Apercepção Infantil (CAT-A) e do Procedimento de Desenhos de Família com Estórias (DF-E) na avaliação de crianças envolvidas em disputas judiciais [The Contribution of the Children Apperception Test (CAT-A) and of the Drawing-of-Family-with-Story Procedure (DF-E) to the evaluation of children involved in legal disputes]. Master’s Dissertation. São Paulo (SP), Instituto de Psicologia da USP, 322 pp.
This work focuses essentially on diagnosis: It tries to discover, through the use of projective techniques, the needs, conflicts and feelings of the divorced parent’s children involved in judicial disputes. Considering the complexity of the custody disputes issue, historical, ethical, philosophical, psychological and technical aspects related to it were analyzed here.The central goal of this work was to check if the CAT-A and the Drawing-of-Family-with-Story Procedure (DF-E) could provide relevant information to understand the emotional situation of children in this context, and also, had as a complementary objective, the knowledge of significant emotional aspects present in children disputed by their parents. Ten disputed children (5 boys and 5 girls) aging from 6 to 10 years old, whose families had been evaluated by psychologists from judicial courts, were studied. Results from the CAT-A and the DF-E provided two kinds of new information about: 1) unconscious or not spoken (negative or positive) aspects associated to parental images; 2) personality dynamics: by clearing up of emotional needs; defensive aspects of eventual alliances between child and one of the parents; and psychological damages caused by the situation of judicial dispute or by the family dynamics. Two groups of relevant aspects were noticed in the analysis of the cases: 1) formation of alliances between the child and one of the parents, associated to external factors that had resonance with internal factors; 2) conflicts resulted from guilt. Then, the question of parental dispute was discussed, which specially increases depressive anxieties and triggers primitive defense mechanisms that delay the mental integration and the psychological development of the child. A need to give more emphasis on interventional approaches became evident, especially mediation. Mediation has a tendency to decrease the persecutory anxiety and the regressive processes, favoring the resolution of the family conflict.