François Pommier : idealization, pre-adolescence and transference

As he retraces the treatment of one of his female patients, the author seeks to show the vicissitudes of the transference relation up until the moment when the analytic unbinding permits the patient to leave analysis. The tipping point occurs when the analyst attempts to revisit within the counter-transference the consensual relations of the latency period. The patient, whose functioning has been hampered since puberty, then consents to question the parental images of her pre-adolescence and finds a new dynamic, leading her to discover the structural elements of her personality. The author emphasizes the way in which the analyst is led to displace himself within the treatment, finally adopting the position of a witness, which enables him to remove himself from the process of idealization in which his patient tends to enclose herself and to get her out of the precarious situation in which the psychoanalytical situation had closed her. The author explains to what extent, in the counter-transference, his own anxieties and the expression of his sometimes dizzying position enables his patient to journey through her pre-adolescence.