While reference to destructiveness is essential to understanding the psychic dynamic inherent to the deployment of war, it should be associated with narcissistic issues at work in both the group and the individual. The choice of an enemy against whom one can unleash the violence of drives can be a solution for addressing the fragilization of the Ego in adolescence. So how do we participate clinically in the transformation of the warrior dynamic?
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 193-204.
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.
Looking at Freud’s adolescence and his passionate friendships, this article will explore a quest for an alter ego that can regress to the status of narcissistic “controlling” doubles. This can produce a narcissistic wound, as otherness is no longer shown to complete the ego, but to be intolerably different from and independent of it. Moreover, the implications of this can be seen in Freud’s relationship with his daughter Anna.
Adolescence, 2024, 42, 1, 13-27.
The nautical image of the doldrums that suggested by D. W. Winnicott to describe the period of adolescence illustrates the way that some patients are immobilized. The re-actualization of the Oedipal conflict, when it has not disappeared, will appeal to the Ego and mobilize narcissism. In a treatment center for adolescents, institutional psychotherapy associated with group treatment can help them start sailing again.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 91-102.
On the basis of long-term observations, this article will analyze the practices of secondary school teachers who use a social network with their students. The presentation of the results will enable us to add some nuance to the oft-heard claim that adolescents are increasingly on social media. On the contrary, these tools can encourage the fantasy that teachers are omnipotent and omnipresent. In some, they can also contribute to a confusion between private space and the professional sphere.
Adolescence, 2022, 40, 2, 321-335.
In the adolescent, an absence or porosity of links with infantile objects causes a crack in the potential for identification and plunges him/her into an unbearable and unsettling feeling that the Ego is uncanny. The psychotherapeutic setting enables the patient to express his hatred towards the mother or the father, within a transference onto the psychoanalyst that makes it possible to encounter another, identified as “stranger,” who is sufficiently different (sexually) and differentiated (narcissistically).
Adolescence, 2017, 35, 2, 325-333
Adolescence, the age of possibilities, belongs to the field of discontinuity, the most perceptible form of which is corporal. Other discontinuities – psychic, familial, environmental – are proper to this age. Traces of the primary phases of development will echo these reorganizations.
Adolescence, 2017, 35, 1, 101-109.
Adolescent selfies intrigue the psychoanalyst, and their widespread proliferation on social media lead us to revisit the mirror stage. Are these self-images a reflecting mirror or an empty mirror? Even when they are enormously narcissistic, selfies come from a quest for identity, even a quest for beauty, and may be kindred with self-portrait. Beyond the ludic and narcissistic aspects, they are linked with fundamental questions of identity, sexuality and death.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 623-632.
In an older adolescent with psychosomatic symptoms, the autosadistic symptom of trichotrillomania brings together deficiencies in the Body-ego and its attempts at autoerotic appropriation. These repeated traumatophiliac wounds are a survival method maintaining the excitation of a disavowed maternal absence whose memory traces infiltrate the memory of the sick body. What is at stake in the therapy is the revisiting, in the transference, of the homo- function and primitive auto-reflection.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 587-596.
Activity seems to fulfill important functions for the work of masculinity that takes place during adolescence. What happens when this work is hampered by somatic illness? In light of a clinical vignette, these functions of differentiation/delimitation, of containing and support, but also of experimentation and virile potency will be explored.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 563-573.