This article describes mimetism as a psychotic survival mechanism, a solution to identificatory conflict. Psychotic children show continuous change, one of the forms of such change being the phenomenon of mimetism. This term, borrowed from zoology, is used in the psychological arena to indicate how a psychotic child may resort to mimetism both in practice and in attitudes of identification with its closest objects. A case is presented of a 10-years-old psychotic girl who uses mimetism as a mechanism of selfconservation. This patient obtains protection by mimetizing through identificatory behavior with her closest objects. This mechanism may be hard to predict because of the constant fluctuations in identification but, paradoxically, it is a foreseeable aspect in the analysis of children, in view of their fear of annihilation.
Mimetism; identificatory conflict; child analysis