This article will attempts to envision what is specific to adolescent psychotherapies using two clinical cases. The first evokes a form of “ideal of being there”, where the clinician is a benevolent interlocutor accompanying the adolescent’s intrapsychical readjustments. In the second, family disorder, among other things, hampers the encounter with the adolescent in the here and now of the session.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 599-608.
Starting with a clinical observation, this work shows the place that can be taken by a family approach to modes of borderline functioning in adolescence. This place can be conceived of only after a necessary clarification of context when a many professionals are engaged in the situation. The model of attachment, the taking into account of relational reality and the active engagement of the therapist are decisive factors.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 577-597.
Families of patients hospitalized in treatment-school facilities and the cargegivers share common fantasies of separation-adoption, reparation-destruction and seduction-rejection. In this “adolescent constellation”, parents and staff members regularly find themselves in positions of identification, projection, isomorphism, systematic reflection, echo. These phenomena make things difficult for the caregivers, but their understanding and their elaboration are an opportunity for the patients, their families, and the institution.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 555-576.
Around 30% of the Inuits of Nunavik (Quebec) are reported to Child Protective Services. In 2010, a Residence was developed specifically for these youngsters in order to respond to their clinical and cultural needs. The objective of the present study is to explore how youths use this residential space. The results suggest that, on the one hand, the residence constitutes a “permeable institution”, allowing a certain continuity in the youngsters, despites the many ruptures they’ve experienced, while, on the other hand, the young people who are marginalized in general have a tendency to gravitate towards relationships and towards the center when they have the space in which to do this.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 541-554.
The situations of unaccompanied foreign minors are a paradigm for the difficulties that professionals may face when parents are absent. Clinical work requires precisely that the parents be made to exist in the narrative, based on the adolescent’s capacity to narrate himself, in order to construct an adolescence that is mixed, between two worlds. We illustrate this through two clinical vignettes drawn from individual consultations in a Maison des Adolescents, in the presence of an interpreter.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 531-539.
For this French and Ivory Coast couple, stuck in a great social and elaborative isolation, parenthood was a painful experience, marked by traumatic ethnic mix that was crying out for transcultural space. This space enabled the parents to think about each one’s life history, migration, confrontation of cultural representations (having to do with children, parenthood, couplehood…) but also links and places within the family.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 521-530.
Eight years of practice in a support group for parents of adolescents with eating disorders at the Maison de Solenn have led to the following observations: against the risk of being closed up in the family system, taking part in a group, co-conducted by a parent and a caregiver, gives a feeling belonging and enables a “return to society”. The “containing” effect on psychical movements accelerates the mobilization of family resources and the therapeutic alliance. The importance of attachment links that form also enable one to consider the group as a place for mutual aid.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 511-520.
This article recounts the first experience of group treatment of parents of adolescents suffering from mental anorexia at the Maison des Adolescents of Calvados. The authors have chosen a faithful retranscription of productive moments from the sessions close to clinical work, emphasizing the experience of counter-transference.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 503-510.
In the current way of receiving adolescents and their parents at the Maison des Adolescents of Yvelines Sud, the biggest pitfall for the therapeutic staff is the risk of collusion with certain defense mechanisms of the youngsters and/or their families. Such collusions can hamper the work of narration and co-construction during encounters, starting with the representations of the adolescents, of their entourage, their difficulties finding their way and the resources available to them in their territory.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 493-502.
The demand for treatment of school-avoiding adolescents is on the rise, most often coming from the families and rarely from the adolescents themselves. The school symptom suddenly reveals a serious family suffering. Work with the adolescents’ parents appears to be of the utmost importance. Thinking about the flexibilty of the treatment frame and setting up co-consultations helps mobilize the familial and individual psychical resources that were previously unimagined.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 481-491.