This article examines the investment of conversational AI by students presenting anxiety-based school refusal. Using the concepts of psychophobia and phobia of mental functioning, the author reads certain uses of AI as an anti-thinking prosthetic. He introduces the document-Ego, a contemporary function of subjectivation through the archive, from the inscribed body to the conversation history, which may either support elaboration or harden into a fossilized holding.
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.
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