The pubertaire (pubertary) defines an external grasp of the subject by genital instinct and its societal expressions. The phenomenon requires psychic work of perlaboration and modifies the analyzing situation with adolescents, especially modes of transference and counter-transference.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 161-167.
With reference to the Freudian concept of Hilflosigkeit, the author connects studies of the evolution of the newborn’s psychic life with the evolution of psychic life in adolescence. Taking into consideration the new sensory experience of the pubertaire, the author will use as an example the case of an adolescent with borderline functioning.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 141-159.
This article offers an analysis of Billy Elliot exploring the this adolescent’s battle against a silence that has been hanging over his family since his mother’s death. This quest is guided by the expression of his desire to dance. Our argument relies on C. Metz’s theory of the imaginary signifier and examines the enacting of a confrontation between the real, the unconscious, and desire, revealing the ethical and tragic journey of Billy’s desire.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 127-140.
This article explores the role of silence in the context of a treatment involving individual psychodrama with an adolescent. Silence appears as a structuring factor in the treatment format and as a support to elaboration and subjective appropriation. Using a clinical case, we will take an in-depth look at the issues at stake and the limits when silence is no longer able to sustain associations. Then it reveals weakness in the capacity for reflection and leads the therapists make some adjustments in their way of being present.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 113-126.
This article will offer an analysis of the silence adolescents impose on their therapist within group psychotherapy. The authors hypothesize that this silence is a projection of adolescents’ archaic anxieties and fantasies of devouring and incorporation onto their therapist. The latter, by offering him or herself as a transforming receptacle, opens the way for a more secondarized kind of psychical elaboration.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 101-112.
Role-play as a form of mediation seems adapted to the treatment of adolescent disorders. Nevertheless, clinical practice is confronted with the specific nature of psychical organizations that mobilize transference links based on rupture, destructiveness, and the avoidance of thinking and making links. Using a clinical case, we will show mediation processes that foster the emergence of a move to return to objectal investments and thought processes.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 89-100.
Using the case of Jerome, we will argue that the silences of affects in the speech of patients reveals how heavily repression weighs on the work of elaborating the metamorphoses of the pubertaire and how it can thus preside over the emergence of sexually violent acts. Such acts attest to the unpredictability of the work of adolescence. With the support of educational and legal third parties, therapeutic work will then focus on recomposing affects and creating new bonds within the transference.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 75-87.
This article will explore the unconscious mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of school truancy in the adolescent’s intrapsychic space, where it ties in with intersubjective links within educational links, and the institutional responses and reactions to truancy, as well as specific contributions of the psychologist from the National Education system.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 61-74.
The psychotherapy of Abel explores narcissistic defenses mobilized against intrusion by the drives and against objectal investments with their implications for transference and counter-transference. The silenciation of the body and the rejection of every libidinal investment of the ego is a rupture of intersubjectivity. The therapeutic setting then reactivates sensory traces, enabling an exploration of immobility as a narcissistic transformation and an attempt to rediscover the feeling that one exists.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 49-59.
The authors explore the role and the place of silence in clinical work with young adolescents for whom the reflecting function could not be structured in a stable enough way. In order for these patients to be able to latch onto the analyst’s silence as a space-time allowing them to dive into themselves and listen to themselves speaking, preliminary work is required. In these difficult treatments, it will be essential to listen to body language and to the language of acts, as well as to the transference onto the setting.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 35-48.