Psychotic manifestations in adolescence can take on a defensive aspect when dealing with psychotic illness, a breakdown (Laufer, M. and M. E.). Fanny presented delusive and hallucinatory activity and her symptoms disappeared after two years of therapy. Psychotherapeutic technique must follow a common thread: the conviction that the delirious and the hallucinatory belong to the internal world of the patient and form part of her narrative about herself; the associative thread of the session makes it possible to suggest that the patient invite psychotic elements into her psychic space or world, thereby putting them into the “world,” which is an identity created by the psychotic person.
Archives par mot-clé : Subjectivation
François Richard : The Work of Representation and the Psychotic Process
This paper supports the hypothesis that the process of subjectivation resorts to a firmness of personal or artistic style when the subject is threatened by psychotic attacks, especially during adolescence. Thought and representation are then seen to intensify in the subject, but it is difficult to distinguish between the excess of melancholic consciousness, psychotic anxiety, and a type of sublimation that is fascinated by drive chaos. The paper proposes a second hypothesis regarding, inversely, the usefulness of a kind of solitude and of masochistic compromise with object and reality. A moment of psychotic crisis in an adolescent girl with a neurotic problem is presented in terms of how the quest for the distinctiveness of style curbs her breakdown. The paper then analyzes the theatrical work of the playwright S. Kane in detail; indeed, here we find an example of the paradox of a suicide that follows successful representational mastery. Finally, we discuss Freud’s ideas about masochistic destructiveness and Winnicott’s ideas about the core of the true self as being non-communication.
Ingrid Piesen : techno ritual
The techno movement represents a « counter-cultural » musical trend around which youths gather when setting up « re-creative » festive spaces. This article proposes to demonstrate the paradoxical character of the rave party phenomenon which, though it runs the risk of chronicizing borderline-case experiences, seems sometimes to open the way for a process of subjectivation, through the regression incited by group bonding and the rituals that organize it (musical tradition, drug use, integration of specific codes.)
Jacques Arènes : party and religion : a space for subjectivation
The party was born in the environment of religion, but the religious feast has evolved in its content and aims. The « we » is giving way to the boosting of narcissism and the search for subjectivation. Some aspects of the religious feast are today invested as spaces for conversion and self-transformation. In every case the subject will adhere to the religious « we » intermittently, in moments of fused capillarity, which may be renewed over time, but will not necessarily join a church. The festive will be both the moment for encountering God and the imagined scene of confrontation with one’s own destiny.
Alberto Konicheckis : pregnancy in adolescence, cultural area and the weaving of early bonds
In order to explore the coincidence of these two forms of identity crisis, adolescence and motherhood, two hypotheses are offered: one dealing with the cultural factor in the avoidance or facilitation of psychopathological disorders ; and the second considering pregnancy and motherhood as antinomic with regard to adolescent processes. These lines of thought are developed in three parts. The first, which is based on an interview with Inès, a young mother of gypsy origin, helps one to understand how the cultural space, shared with the outer social world, lends itself to bearing the inner psychical world. In the second part, pregnancy’s resistance to adolescent processes are dealt with through the novelties of the pubertaire and narcissitic issues. In the third part, we present the treatment of a pregnant adolescent and her family within the setting of a multidisciplinary parenthood support network.
Arnaldo Novelletto : adolescence and psychoanalysis, confrontation between theoretical models and clinical strategies.
The author deals with the ongoing debate over applying psychoanalysis to adolescent patients. He presents and discusses different theses about the two types of therapeutic intervention, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Odile Falque : the mysticism of everyday life with etty hillesum
Mysticism : one can’t talk about it, and one can’t not talk about it. It consists of remaining in the illusion and the tension of paradoxes, particularly life-death, through a revisiting of the adolescent processes that Etty Hillseum situates at the onset of puberty. She returns to the originary, and it is a matter of getting out of this. This is what is at stake in her encounter with her psychologist, Julius Spier, an encounter that was, first of all, eroticized, in transgression, afterwards idealized and sublimated, in the discovery all at once the capacity to be alone, to think, to dream, to pray, for both seekers after God.
The mystical experience would be rooted in enjoyment, in transgression and in death.
“ The mysticism of everyday life ” may be spoken of in the psychical economy of the subject in movements of libidinal hyperinvestment, of disinvestment and of re-investment in the reality of daily life, which brings renewed energy, for the deepening and widening of psychical and spiritual space, caring for others, the mission that must be accomplished and the witness that must be given.
Such was the path of Etty Hillesum, a mystic who remain “ on the march ” towards death, survival, as recounted in her diaries An Interrupted Life, between 1941 and 1943, from Amsterdam to Auschwitz.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 23-39.
François Richard : le processus d’adolescence à l’âge adulte : le cas de la femme léopard
À partir d’un cas de cure psychanalytique de jeune adulte, cet article cherche à cerner les caractéristiques du passage, au-delà de l’adolescence, vers la vie d’adulte. Il s’agit d’une patiente de structure hystérique comportant une dimension psychosomatique et une propension à l’agir. La cure permit le développement après-coup d’un processus d’élaboration du pubertaire jadis empêché. La façon dont la multiplicité des pulsions partielles prégénitales infantiles peut être ressaisie dans une synthèse génitale « polyphonique » est étudiée. La subjectivation adulte se nourrit de la proximité du sexuel infantile, la meilleure façon d’éviter une structuration adulte défensive et inauthentique serait donc de tolérer en soi tout une part d’enfance et d’adolescence.
Anne Bourgain : signature issues in adolescence
The signature is a complex act which partakes of the trace and of its erasure. Between mimicry and self-affirmation, it allows one to approach the question of the name in the adolescent. By extension, we will explore other modes of signature in adolescence, investigating the relevance of this designation: one can reasonably wonder if it is still a signature. Who signs in adolescence ? To what degree do the various ways of expression, which are often distancing practices, come to « sign » something of the subject ? Above all, this work tries to illustrate the way in which fantasies of self-foundation can both foster and hinder the work of subjectivation, and so doing, open, or not open, the passage.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 1023-1035.
Ferruccio Bianchi : the difficulty of becoming a woman : knowledge acquired from anorexic adolescent girls
The author considers that the difficulties the adolescent girl encounters on her way to becoming a woman are grave symptomatic manifestations of a process of becoming a woman which may be common to all female children. The future anorexic would already be established when a little girl, a system of false-self which reaches a crisis point at puberty. Anorexia, a counter-evolutionary process which entails a risk of psychical and physical death, is a form of psychopathology that also masks an unconscious desire for emancipation and subjectivation.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 959-975.