Transformations affecting youngsters’ relationship with their own image result from their adaptation to two radically new situations they are confronted with from earliest childhood : the omnipresence of images – most notably those that their parents make of them – and new family organizations in which the desire the child observes is maintained for a longer and longer time. « Being famous » is then perceived as the privileged means for resolving several contradictory desires and anxieties at the same time.
Archives par mot-clé : Narcissism
Renée-Laeticia Richaud : sylvie-christine, a reaction
Listening to a presentation of a case of mutism and a family secret in a day hospital, it seems to me that an adolescent girl is managing to make her caregivers live through what she herself can neither experience, nor think, nor talk about. During the presentation, the clinical work goes on like a demonstration: the presenters’ slips-of-the-tongue lead to a continuation of the work of putting into thought, and the counter-transference brings about an exploration of the necessity for audacious daydreams, not in order to consider them as truths, but to free the caregivers’ thoughts from the prohibition of thinking that weighed upon them as much as upon the teenaged girl. The approach to troubles of narcissism and identification may benefit from being freely redloyed in this way by the analyst, both in his capacity to make himself into a good enough malleable medium, and in his hypotheses concerning the transgenerational heritage and the impact of parental narcissism, especially when pain create avoidance of the thought. Once again, a grave pathology gives us an approach to more common problems.
Serge Hefez : tie me up. dangerous liaisons of the couple and the family
The author investigates the modifications of personality structure linked to specific changes in society and culture, mainly modifications of family life and modes of socialization.
The family therapist must take into account the social dimension of narcissism. It is necessary to work on marital and familial bonds in relation to the imperatives of freedom and the weakness of external constraints in limiting them.
Ignacio Melo : reflections on the role of drive and of narcissism in adolescent psychotherapy
Adolescence is characterized by an instability and a vulnerability of the systems of psychical functioning, within which the drive is oriented towards diverse and potentially changing outcomes. This problematic is actualized in sessions of psychotherapy, affecting their course. In addition, putting narcissism back into play in therapeutic dialogues leads to other parameters, in particular one that I have called « the transitionalization of exchanges », to which I refer in relation to the body. Drive is studied on a theoretical plane, and its place is analyzed in different systems of psychical functioning that one might find in the session. Their swift variations can pose a problem. In this context, transforming what might appear to be an obstacle to the good progression of the treatment into a therapeutic resource seems to me a clinical and theoretical goal. This work may form a basis for reflection, which should be continued and completed in the future.
Houari Maïdi : the beautiful, the ugly, and gender
Narcissistic, homoerotic, even “ feminine ”, the adolescent is passionately attracted to the beautiful, by the beauty of the image of the body, and all that involves the perception of an ideal bodily representation, i.e. a fantasy image, is coveted and wished of oneself. However, if homoerotism is inherent in narcissistic puberty, homosexuality, as gender and as “ structured ” inclination of the sexual life, appears to be related to the infantile archaic and in particular to find its essence in the fundamental aesthetic meeting of infancy.
Jean-Baptiste Lecuit : mysticism, between regression and sublimatory passion
This article shows how the Freudian reduction of mysticism to a regression to primary narcissism can be placed in perspective and extended through a consideration of the sublimatory dynamic animating certain great mystical figures, and the amorous interpersonal dimension of their life of faith. It shows Freud’s understanding of mysticism, in its difference from religion, and considers contributions by other authors such as C. Parat, S. de Mijolla-Mellor, and A. Vergote.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 143-157.
Fanny Dargent : red, narcissisus. recourse to the body and refusal of otherness
The psychotherapy of a teenager who practices body attacks sheds light on archaic processes at work in terms of bodily resistance to the investment of the object and the refusal of otherness. The dual situation reactualizes an internal otherness blocked by adhesive, anti-drive alienation from tyrannical, undifferentiated objects. Vigilance against visible « sensory-motor » objects as an effect of the Other, and against the counter-transference, works, with the aid of a psychodramatic style, to re-establish the transitionality which was blocked in this narcissistic teenager.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 157-165.
Catherine Chabert : does the Oedipus complex still exist ?
The author observes that in Freud’s work the Oedipus complex is omnipresent but rarely theorized as such; she asks whether the Oedipus complex is characteristic of neuroses or if it also occurs in narcissistic and borderline functioning. The case history of an adolescent girl shows that dependence and prevalence of the narcissistic relationship with the mother may mask a paradoxical but strong relationship with the father. Returning to Freud’s writings (Three Essays, The Ego and the Id), Chabert seeks connections between the Oedipus complex and objectal loss-anxiety, and even more, a consubtantiality of loss and the sexual, which is the central idea of Mourning and Melancholy.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 65-79.
Houari Maïdi : églantine*
The teenager is extremely sensitive to his image. This one is dreaded as much as invested with strength and fascination. In this article, we present an observation that illustrates the complex and ambivalent perceptions of a body full of diverse troubles. A body which seems to be the Pandora’s box of all the fears arisen from the childhood and from the adolescence, and a body-shop window, a narcissistic facade by the glance of the other one, but at the same time being afraid that this glance sees inside herself, its intimacy, its thoughts, its fears, where from this frequent paranoid aspect in the adolescence.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 779-785.
Nicolas Peraldi : bad son. social integration put to the test by subjectivation
The clinical account is an indirect approach whose only function is to help one get one’s bearings. Through, or more exactly, in the throughways of a trajectory wherein a young man in the care of Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, in a context of complete failure to achieve social or professional integration, I will try to show how a process of subjectivation was elaborated, allowing this youth to reconstruct his present by the yardstick of his past, to symbolize and to appropriate what had until then only been felt. This text is written as a triptych. The three parts can be read independently of one another, but it is nevertheless in the link between them that the specific nature of the argument I wish to put forth in this article will be developed. Each part refers to a reading, a phase of elaboration. It opens with a clinical vignette, a preamble to the reflection which follows. I could have connected the vignettes in a single sequence and developed my elaboration point by point afterwards. I have preferred this (dis)articulation which, in my opinion, better serves to dramatize the case in question.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 765-778.