The author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection about primal violence and it’s repercussions for the psychic constitution of the subject. A clinical case will enable us to explore the terror experienced in the primary relation and the consequences of this when drive issues play out with a substitute object. For the analyst, it is a matter of encouraging the emergence of a capacity for symbolic representation, while the violence of the trauma appears as the negative of this capacity.
Clinical work with adolescents brings to the forefront the sensorial, yet this is little studied in the psychoanalytic field. Through the study of the case of Tamara, we will explore the place of the sensorial in the adolescent process, in its symbolizing dimension, but also in its paradoxical aspect, between emptiness and saturation. This allows us to approach some clinical clues by studying the clinician’s counter-transference with adolescents we call “tightrope walkers”.
Role-play as a form of mediation seems adapted to the treatment of adolescent disorders. Nevertheless, clinical practice is confronted with the specific nature of psychical organizations that mobilize transference links based on rupture, destructiveness, and the avoidance of thinking and making links. Using a clinical case, we will show mediation processes that foster the emergence of a move to return to objectal investments and thought processes.
The passage through adolescence may give rise to a violent family crisis, echoing group processes of generational transmission and adolescent experiences of subjects in the present. Psychoanalytic family therapy, taking place within a psychiatric setting that offers several different treatment places and times, enables a revisiting of the processes of symbolization, with the support of mediating objects: those provided by the therapists but also those invented by the family.
The discovery of individual analytical psychodrama has offered clinicians new possibilities for the psychological treatments of adolescents. Using an excerpt from the treatment of a boy at the onset of puberty, this article will discuss the link between psychodrama and two-person improvisation. This reflection will focus on the possibility of borrowing the interpretive strategy of psychodrama to help a dual relation whose dynamic is stalled.
The author explores the therapeutic potential of storytelling mediation, using her experience with a group therapeutic setting for hospitalized adolescents. How does that mediation provide the encounter with a psychoanalyst and the beginning of a therapeutic process? Regarding the symbolizing potential of storytelling, how would its use in a therapeutic setting facilitate the organization of traumatic experiences associated with puberty, echoing the dream work?
This paper offers us an opportunity to present and explore a treatment based on corporal mediation for adolescents hospitalized in a child psychiatric ward. We will show how the proposal to use fabrics and mime as a space for mobilizing the body, can be a support for subjectivation and psychic transformation, especially at this period of life.
The description of a therapy group using the mediating forms of dance and writing in a day-hospital shows how unsymbolized memory traces emerge and are transformed through group associations, both corporal and verbal. Thus new representations of the body and its origins – vectors of subjectivation – are created.
The tendency to believe in images is fundamental to psychical life. However, images – especially violent ones – can suggest models, but are by themselves unable to impose the desire to correspond to them. They are most often sought for their power of figuring, as much in the domain of body states and archaic imagery as of day-to-day emotions that are sometimes difficult to represent.
Adolescents spontaneously use three complementary means of managing the malaise provoked in them by violent images : language, interior representations and corporal representations. These three means are the key to education with images.
The clinical treatment of adolescents who display serious intellectual deficiencies raises a number of questions concerning the possibilities of the work of adolescence within its double trajectory of access to genital sexuality and new temporal order, insofar as access to symbolization seems to be “ barred ” by lasting instrumental inadequacies which hinder overall development. Most often reduced to the space of the small child, the space-time of the mentally deficient youth does remain marked by very archaic modes of psychical functioning which tend to freeze all temporal unfolding and all otherness. Nevertheless, pubescent sexuality is not absent; but its elaboration follows paths that are skewed in relation to the usual paradigm of the neurotic theater. Contributions from theorization about childhood autism and recent work on the psychosomatic offer a field of research on the heterogeneity of symbolic modes that on encounters in certain forms of deficiency pathology, and opens up the impasse of mere deficiency to the complexity of these types of organization, particularly at the time of adolescence when the investment of the body in its drive and sensory dimension is at the forefront of the time of the other.
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