When he was little, Julien had not one, but two imaginary friends!
He told his parents of having attended the birthday of one of them, named Fred, in a circus, in the presence of a giraffe and an elephant.
Julien may have had a particularly fertile imagination, but he is not the only child, far from it, to have experienced this kind of magic.
In a 2004 American study by the Universities of Oregon and Washington, 65% of children over 7 years old said they had had an imaginary friend at some point in their life.
In 67% of cases, this companion was invisible and in 33% of cases, it was embodied in one of their toys.
Read the fileOur daily psychological advice
“This phenomenon is not worrying because the imaginary friend is not an hallucination that the child would keep for himself alone,
reassures Adrien Blanc, clinical psychologist in the Medico-Psychological Center and author of
My doudou, the object transitional that makes you grow
(In Press).
He makes it live openly by discussing...
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