Using his experience of specific psychiatric consultation for adolescents at the Geneva Maternity Hospital, the author offers some thoughts on pregnancy in adolescence, the psychical transformations that it conditions, and the work around the proposal that the pregnancy be terminated. The place of the girl’s parents and that of the adolescent father are also treated. The desire for a child in adolescence is treated with reference to the girl’s history and her future.
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Michel Delage, Maryse Petitjean, Aline Delahaye, Jean-Luc Bruno : when the adolescent tests parenthood within a reconstructed family
The family’s reconstruction occasions numerous individual and group changes. These changes touch particularly upon parenthood. In the past family reconstitution occurred after a death and achieved a substitute family. Now it achieves an additional family and the child finds himself confronted with a real « parental constellation ». It often induces him to play an active part in the complex games the grown ups are practicing.
So when he leaves one parent to live with the other, the adolescent revives the old game played between the separated partners. At the same time, his new presence within the reconstituted household strongly tests the marital life of the new couple.
A crisis develops all the more in that the tensions are more often acted than thought. It has consequences on the therapeutic interventions, which are essentially based, at least initially, on a relational classification which must be quick and brief. In fact there is a great risk of the family shattering and of a new separation.
Brigitte Prati : are adopted adolescents at higher risk for attempting suicide than their non adopted peers ?
In developed countries, adopted children represent less than 1% of births, but may represent over 20% of the patients in mental health services. This imbalance raises the question of the relationship between adoption and psychopathology, and more precisely between adoption and suicide crisis in adolescence.
Based on a review of the scientific literature and on her own clinical experience, the author offers some psychodynamic hypotheses and points out potential directions for reflection upon this problematic.
Pierre Lévy-Soussan : filiation tested by adolescence
The solidity of adoptive filiation is gauged when tested by the identity mutations proper to adolescence. The parental setting is much solicited in its function of containing and of transforming adolescent anxieties. The path which has led to the child-turned-adolescent is then re-interrogated to test the originating imaginary world of the couple in its historicizing role. We will discuss the reasons for the psychical vulnerability of adoptive filiation, and the similarities between filiating process and adolescent process. On the parents’ side, one difficulty is represented by the inability to make a connection between the child in his pre-adoptive history, marked by abandonment and affective deficiencies, and the continuity of their own family history.
Jérôme Boutinaud : parenthood and support group
The clinical experience of facilitating support groups for parents of adolescents leads to thoughts which, starting from the group dynamic and what settles into it, allows us to formulate a range of hypotheses about the psychical impact produced in the parent by his child’s attainment of adolescence. Here the group is conceived of as a possible place for opening and symbolization where the protagonists question each other and carry on a common psychical work on these implications.
Françoise Hurstel : « the annunciation to the husband », or the three phases of becoming a father
From the « annunciation to the husband » (You are going to be a father, I’m expecting your baby), through birth, to the first weeks of the baby’s life, the father who is also the mother’s companion is too often forgotten, in terms of what he is experiencing, his functions and the specific psychical upheaval the work of fatherhood entails. This research portrays the three principle phases of becoming a father and the different registers that modulate the paternal partition.
Philippe Jeammet : reflections on parenthood
Human beings have a natural ability for raising children, otherwise humankind would cease to exist. But it is true that recent social evolution makes this role more complex, if not more difficult. The permissiveness of western society has partly removed a certain consensus about the disciplinary rules that once intervened as a third party between the desires of the parents and those of the children. This loss, while in many ways beneficial, has the disadvantage of giving rise to an incestual type of closeness between the partners and fostering a narcissistic investment between them, blurring the limits. What differentiates the child from the adolescent then is what escapes the parents’ desire, that is everything having to do with opposition, dissatisfaction, provocation and, potentially, destructiveness. « This is me », the youngster can say, because it puts the adult in a position of failure and impotence, allowing the youngster to escape from the anxiety of abandonment, because he causes worry, and from the anxiety of fusion and intrusion that shared pleasure can give rise to.
However, this invitation to the parents to « understand » their emotional relations with their children must not paralyze them in their action and their spontaneity, and reinforce the situation wherein the children are expected to dictate their upbringing to their parents, whose place they would then take, in a way. It appears more favorable to free their confidence in their own capacity for being parents, while dissuading them from wanting to control everything and from blaming themselves as soon as any problem arises. On the other hand, any lasting difficulty that arises which prevents the youngster from feeding on what he needs to develop, thus reinforcing a pathogenic dependence on the adult and the necessity of opposing in order to differentiate himself, to the detriment of the development of his abilities, cries out for both a firm limit set by the parents on destructive behavior and an opening towards a third party as a way out of this sterile confrontation.
Myriam Boubli, Brigitte Efrat-Boubli : parenthood : a process fostering psychic growth beyond the confusion of tongues
The notion of « parenthood » is seen here as a mostly unconscious process, beginning in archaic and primordial foundations and ending in the establishment of social bonding. While avoiding the risk of a parasitic bonding system, « parenthood » allows for the development of interrelations between partners, the Oedipal triangulation and the construction of a sexual identity. In addition, at its most organized level, through sublimation, this process fosters socialization and creativity.
François Richard : parenthood, a debatable notion
This article tries to show that the notion of parenthood emerges in the context of an historical evolution where the social bond tends to reproduce itself, beyond traditional kinship systems. This should be brought seriously into the discussion, insofar as the psychoanalytical concept of drive conflict and the centrality of interpreting the transference are in danger of being forgotten. The first part describes the current modes of « culture and its discontents ». Afterwards, we will study some avatars of borderline subjectivation who rationalize themselves within a discourse on parenthood. In conclusion, parenthood and kinship are put into a dialectical relationship by being put into anthropological perspective.
Monique Bydlowski : motherhood and fatherhood
The concept of parenthood is debatable, because it does not take into account the difference between the specifically maternal and specifically paternal parental crises that the two parents go through at the moment of childbirth. The content of these two crises is described in broad outline.