Through a clinical vignette, we will illustrate how hospitalization in a pediatric-psychiatric unit plays a part in the treatment of young people who have withdrawn from social life. Immersion in the institutional setting, participation in individual and family interviews, group activities, and networking helps remobilize objectal investments and restart the process of differentiation and subjectivation.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 219-231.
At the beginning of adulthood one is faced with a number of losses. Group therapy has relevance at this age as a support for projections to bring out and then deal with this issue. Clinical vignettes show how the place that each one takes, the way that each identifies with the others, the anxieties and conflicts that emerge in sessions, are all drivers that enable young adults to engage in a therapeutic process.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 205-217.
This article presents a case study of an adolescent girl in social withdrawal (hikikomori), including interviews with her parents. The Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI – informant version), and the McGill Illness Narrative Interview (MINI) are used. The author emphasizes the necessity of starting treatment early, via home visits, and insists on the feeling of abandonment in both young people and their parents.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 193-203.
Using a clinical case, the author will illustrate the psychoanalytic work that can be offered to autistic subjects, by presenting therapeutic steps attesting to the strides that have been made in the development of the bodily ego. The therapeutic proposals consist of welcoming the autisticizing process and offering accommodations, such as sensorial exploration through touch, sharing of affects, and the creation of scenarios involving bodily shapes.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 179-192.
Adolescent school phobia is associated with an anxiety so great that the resulting inhibition becomes an obstacle to the patient’s access to a fantasy life. It is often coupled with the conduct of at-home claustration, which calls our attention to the archaic fantasy of the Claustrum developed by D. Meltzer. This is a form of intrusive projective identification that thwarts the oedipal conflict by opposing the differentiation process. We will develop these notions using a clinical case.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 167-177.
At the age when many are beginning to venture outside their family, other adolescents, who are reclusive and have stopped going to school, adopt such a monkish attitude that they stay “cloistered” in their room. Unbeknownst to these youths, the religious register returns in different forms in their treatment. Their renunciation of sexuality and their refusal of the outside world, which they wish to ignore completely, fulfills an ideal of purity – which makes it difficult to form bonds, even therapeutic ones.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 155-165.
The author proposes to decline the word “cloistered” in the masculine, using the treatment of males who withdraw socially in adolescence. To do this, she will explore what is specific to the construction of narcissism, boundaries, and the processing of loss in boys. She will then show how these components take part in the boy’s journey through adolescence. Lastly, she will illustrate her arguments with a clinical account, which leads to the issue of the mirror function.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 141-153.
The movements at work in the therapy of a young adolescent girl who suffered a sudden breakdown symptomatic of anorexia nervosa during the lockdown illustrate the roots of this pathology’s psychic imprisonment: the struggle against excitations, the suppression of affects, and the hampering of fantasy elaboration, like a body frozen in its psychosexual development. The activity of representation can once again take place with help from the transference dynamic, which re-actualizes perceptions and feelings.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 129-140.
Using “lockdown journals” kept by adolescents and young adults, which tell of families living together during the public health crisis and the associated lockdown, the author focuses on the adolescent’s room, its polysemics and the many and varied investments that it can be the object of during a time when an entire family is “cloistered”. Unease and resilience coexist and are characteristic of the “room culture” that is emblematic of hypermodernity.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 113-128.
This article will show what is at stake in the case of an adolescent who confines himself and methodically constructs a place of voluntary reclusion, the place of an asceticism, to the point of becoming a figure of burial on the verge of in-terment anxiety. The text will attempt to provide not so much the description of an ascetic arc – its deprivations, seclusion, and attacks on the body – as of the place where it happens, the place of the asceticism, where the family home is undone and covered up by a new space.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 103-112.