The reclusiveness sometimes associated with school phobia in the adolescent adds to its severity. Meeting a housebound adolescent in consultation has something paradoxical about it that echoes specific clinical features of this disorder. Three possible meeting formats are suggested, depending on the degree of avoidance and the dialectic of container and contained. Establishing a therapeutic frame in such situations confronts us with the pitfall of a paradoxical bond.
Becoming an adult is a step in the process of subjectivation, insofar as it initiates a new encounter with external reality and causes a confrontation with many anxieties of abandonment and castration, which can take the form of school phobia. The author uses a reading of Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep, along with a clinical situation, to shed light on the nature and function of this symptom in the dynamic of post-adolescence.
After talking about the growing rift between child psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the author recalls the models (medical, psychopathological, and child psychiatric) we use to conceptualize mental disorders in children and adolescents. He then examines the nature of diagnostic types (descriptive, etiological, and structural) within the major international classifications. The concept of school phobia calls for a structural diagnosis, while that of school refusal is purely descriptive.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 2, 247-256.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7