[Some insights on the history of children's drawings].

Abstract

Both children's use of drawings and their interpretation in psychopathology have a history and even a pre-history. The author comments on the few drawn documents he could gather concerning the latter. He examines the birth of children drawings in psychology, psychiatry and education at the end of the XIXth century and the turn of the XXth. He finally recalls the first traces of its use by psychoanalysis, mainly in France. Some excursi are joined relative to the conditions of discovery of pre-historic art, to the relationship between modern art and child "primitivism", and to the themes of child drawings within cartoons.