Isolating is an institutional affair, to isolate oneself is to play with the inner/outer shell of the « Ego-skin ». Every decision concerning the adolescent and every treatment is situated within this complexity: does the outside, the perceptual, bring into the isolation enough traces for him to be able to think about it, for him to have a capacity for reverie – that is, for him to be able to carry out his adolescence?
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Joëlle Bordet : housing projects, place of refuge, risk of fixation.
Referring to our psycho-sociological research and to several years of reflexive interviews with adolescents, I analyze the way in which the housing project, a space for daily living and belonging, constitutes both a place of refuge and a risk of fixation. In the face of stigma, the adolescent peer group welcomes and protects; it also represents a place of confinement, both in the psychical sense and the sense of material survival. Getting out of the projects requires important steps made up of failures and successes. All leave this adolescent situation, the paths are many, and the recourse to Islam is more and more one of the ways.
Jacques Bourquin : a repeated story. detention centers for delinquent minors
Starting with the ambivalent way the delinquent minor is regarded, this article will show how at different times one favors either prevention and education or – because the delinquent is perceived more as a danger to society – exclusion and confinement.
A story that is continually being played out around the issue of « open » or « closed » institutions.
Philippe Duverger, Jean Malka, Benjamin Petrovic : psychological locking-up in adolescents
This article deals with the various mechanisms leading adolescents to psychological locking-up. Locking-up is different from isolation, inasmuch as it implies a disavowal of the other’s mirroring ability. Because of the conflict between narcissism and object relation and because of the way puberty upsets early dependence on infantile objects, psychological locking-up appears under the guise of a fetishistic relation. The presentation of a few clinical cases will allow us to set down some guidelines enabling adolescents to get free from locking-up, even though, most of the time, these young patients are not asking us for anything.
Bernard Duez: shutting-off and issues of undecidability
After a short ethnological and historical review, the author highlights the work of shutting-off (or retreating) by showing how this shutting-off requires a scene. Starting with a clinical example, emphasizing the scenic dimension and the notion of the internal groups, he shows how at the moment of shutting-off the adolescent falls into an unconscious contract between adolescents and the adult world. It appears that shutting-off refers primarily to problems of intrusion relating to the original insufficiency of the human subject. The work of the internal groups, oscillating between bonding with the other, appropriation of oneself and shutting-off, has the function of transforming the traumatic state, which the author defines as an ambiguous subjective state that confronts the subject with undecidability, with the impossibility of directing his drives. The invention of the bond of incompatibility is an attempt to emerge from this state and set in motion the work of the internal groups.
Charlotte le Van : pregnancy in adolescence : a socially deviant act ?
In these days of commonplace contraception and the prolongation of higher education, adolescent pregnancies appear as a challenge to the socially-prescribed reproductive period and generally give rise to worry and incomprehension. The object of this article is to show how scientific discourse helps to reinforce the socially required age of first pregnancy. Contrary to a medicalized and normative literature, this article will also, on the basis of field studies, call into question some received ideas on the subject, and outline some other explanations for these « culturally » precocious pregnancies.
Sylvain Missonnier : Prenatal parenthood, uncertainty and anticipation
Clinical practice in a maternity ward highlights essential prenatal psychological elements in the perinatal segment of the parenthood process.
Faced with the multiplied uncertainty about how the unborn child will turn out, prenatal parental anticipation is a determining factor. It deserves to be explored in perinatal clinical work as a relevant psychological and psychopathological marker.
In this context, the concept of « virtual object-relation » tries to explore the behavioral, emotional and fantasmatic complexity of the parents/fetus relation and its reappearances, throughout life, at the time of metamorphoses whose outcome is uncertain, such as adolescence.
Patrick Cauvin, Sylvie Bérard, Élyane Allari : the adolescent’s baby. a « transitional object » for its mother
The mother-baby relation corresponds for both to a trap in which the time of development shuts down. Our observations of dyads we were close to in nursery, mother-baby center and pediatric care settings argue in favor of a characteristic mother-baby distance disorder. The infant is invested as a « transition object », used by the mother as transitory support for her parental imagoes in the course of de-idealization, within an unaccomplished post-adolescent process. This results in a behavioral and emotional « house arrest » for the baby, which will have to conform to maternal expectations if it wants to be spared the abrupt experience of defensive withdrawal of maternal investment. Caught between idealization and refusal, the baby experiences early conflict only in its aspect of rupture, which causes a problem for the construction of its subjectivity.
Brigitte Mytnik : le fantasme de magmamatrice*
Here we study the question of the bond between mother and daughter. In some of its occurrences, it uses the fertility as a support.
The words of three teenagers and their mothers concerning the occurrence of a « surprise » pregnancy and the wish to terminate it shows us a singular form of passage by the flesh which nourishes itself on an organizing originating fantasy: that of a undifferentiated collective matrix, the Magmamatrice.
Alberto Konicheckis : pregnancy in adolescence, cultural area and the weaving of early bonds
In order to explore the coincidence of these two forms of identity crisis, adolescence and motherhood, two hypotheses are offered: one dealing with the cultural factor in the avoidance or facilitation of psychopathological disorders ; and the second considering pregnancy and motherhood as antinomic with regard to adolescent processes. These lines of thought are developed in three parts. The first, which is based on an interview with Inès, a young mother of gypsy origin, helps one to understand how the cultural space, shared with the outer social world, lends itself to bearing the inner psychical world. In the second part, pregnancy’s resistance to adolescent processes are dealt with through the novelties of the pubertaire and narcissitic issues. In the third part, we present the treatment of a pregnant adolescent and her family within the setting of a multidisciplinary parenthood support network.