Archives de catégorie : ENG – Mesure et démesure – 2011 T. 29 n°2

Stephen Briggs, Louise Lyon : a developmentally focussed time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy for adolescents and young adults : origins and application

This article discusses processes involved in articulating and evaluating a model of time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy for young people (TPP-A). Through the therapeutic focus on a significant area of developmental difficulty and/or disturbance, within a time-limited period, TPP-A aims to enable the young person to recover the capacity to meet developmental challenges and/or have this capacity strengthened. The article elaborates key aspects of the model and discusses an illustrative case.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 415-434.

Tito Baldini, Daniele Biondo : adolescent therapeutic groups and borderline states

The authors present their experiences with adolescents in borderline states, a particular form of adolescent suffering. Work with adolescents in borderline states using as a reference principle analytical concepts of groups helps – according to the authors – to activate the capacity for making representations and binding them to each other, by restoring to the subjects the dignity of persons who think and dream.

The authors present two clinical situations describing environmental groups – family-type communities and the « Centri di Aggregazione Giovanile » [socio-educational centers specialized in the care of pre-adolescents, adolescents and young adults] – in which they had a chance to share a method of psychoanalytical intervention oriented towards groups, which enabled them to engage with and treat adolescents in borderline states, for whom any classic psychoanalytical psychotherapeutic intervention would have been inapplicable or would result in failure.

The presence of an extended group situation allows borderline adolescents to experience the mental contention of anxieties. By moving in an interpsychical dimension, the psychodynamically oriented group creates the transitional space where difficult adolescents can cover and assimilate the distance between them and the milieu, between psychical space and the wider psychical space of the group.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 397-410.

Rita Sferrazza : psychoanalytic work beyond the walls

Due to changes clinically observed in psychopathologies, care models have been evolving. This article focuses on what kind of possible work need to be made with adolescents facing to frequently psychosocial difficulties. In order to meet specific needs varying from one clinical situation to another, the author shows how important it is to create original models of care, wich remain open for change over time. A clinical vignette highlights which features are used to guide for setting up a framework of psychoanalytic therapy. Both the monitoring of verbal and nonverbal expressions from the patients and their transference on to therapists or stakeholders provide essential benchmarks for therapeutic choices.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 385-395.

Stephan Wenger : paranoia and institutional psychotherapy

Andreas is an adolescent who has broken with school. Welded to his mother with whom he forms a bubble with paranoid features, he has very few relationships based on otherness. His time in the Out-Patient Therapeutic Center, an almost unique psychotherapeutic perspective to our mind, will help to recreate thought about himself and develop his abilities to think about his own and others’ thoughts. Thus the institution offers an opportunity to triangulate Andreas’ psychical functioning, as it can for many patients in whom the « third party » is lacking as a psychical function, or is fragile to a harmful degree, and who are inscribed in perpetual movements of « leaving-being invaded) with the object.

Adolescence, 2011 T. 29 n°2, pp. 355-383.

Jacques Laget : cuts, painting with the blood, glance of the therapist

During a session of psychotherapy, Benoît, 15 year-old, asks if he can make a painting of his blood – painting which he realizes then, at home, and describes in the following session : the eyes of Horus, which he found on internet. He presents a severe depression and projects of suicide, he cuts himself, the narcissistic fragility is massive and the identical problem in the foreground. Benoît claims his depression, says his fascination for its scars, he assimilates his need to see pouring his blood as a dependence with a drug. He wants to cut himself, he needs it, he feels existing. The blood relationships unite him strictly to her twin sister. He says that he does not suffer when he cuts himself, He undergoes in adversity, he feels and paradoxically hardens… The pain strengthens him and there even strengthens the limits of the ego. He so treats his excess big sensibility, signs for him of weakness and passivity which we set against the violence, the power and the strength which he feels in his auto-aggressive behavior.

Glances : his on his blood and painting. The place of the glance, the glances, the eyes of Horus, internal glance of Benoît on his blood which pours, his scars, trying to appropriate a body and a psyche which change and threaten it. Glance of his parents who suffer, he knows that, bewildered, they panic at the beginning, but their glances evolve. Glance of the therapist on his painting, as « adolescent » creation, and resumption of the myth in the therapy. The therapist, the psychotherapy of the attacks of the body, restore a relationship associating creation and representation, opening in the sense.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 355-383.

David Le Breton : on school massacres carried out by adolescents

Young school shooters are far from fitting a common psychological style: some are described as sociable, others as loners. Some live in intact families, others in divorced or separated families. A set of sociological features unites them : the fulfillment of a virility rite when nothing else gives them a sense of self-worth, the impossibility of identifying with others, the wild hatred which in them takes the place of membership the world.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 325-337.

Ségolène Payan : the migratory rite, a hindrance of the process of subjectivation ?

In the traditional societies of western Africa, every year nusmerous teenagers are appointed, ritually, by them peers to be applicants for immigration. The fulfillment of the « mission » which is assigned to them can succeed only in the price of a subjective appropriation of their fate.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 317-324.

Hélène Romano : dangerous « je » (games/I) and psychical processes at work in dangerous practices

In the daily life of children and adolescents, particular conducts may be noted : asphyxiation « games », aggression « games » and death « games ». In light of my regular experience with young people involved in these kinds of conducts, I propose some ideas about the processes at work. In the first part I will present these different « games » and the way they are frequently confused with other kinds of activity ; then I will describe the effect on thought processes and the object relation they imply.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 305-315.

Anne Winter, Loïck M. Villerbu : delinquency in adolescence: another paradigm of link ?

Regularly, the literature concerned with delinquency during adolescence convenes the failure of the paternal authority as explication of transgressions of the social link. These are the hangovers of a theoretical tradition which has shown many times the effects of oedipal triangulation, paradigmatic of emotional and social relationships. Though, a part of clinic is now showing us the importance of the dynamics of exchange subjected to an order of parity, we can not overlook. Underlain by narcissism, it takes precedence over genealogy and gives to distances and proximities an assured function ; the one which will guarantee adolescent reciprocity and integrity, in fouding otherwise his values.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 293-304.

Gérard Bonnet : « vengeance as a means of survival » or life violence, death violence

Violence is one of the most feared forms of human violence and also offers privileged ground for studying this violence in itself. For psychoanalysis, perversion is the psychical organization which most clearly illustrates how this desire for vengeance originates in the human psyche. Its aim is nonetheless paradoxical, as I tried to show in one of my recent books with the title : Perversion, vengeance as a means of survival (Bonnet, 2008). For if the perverse person has such an investment in vengeance, it is paradoxically in order to survive and to counterbalance another, deadly violence, fearsome in another way, which threatens him relentlessly from within. The perverse person counterbalances this death violence by investing every facet of vengeance and it is important to identify these in order to defuse the immediate dangers. Then we see that he invests this survival violence in two ways : either by taking them out on others, whom he transforms into survival objects, in the most serious perversions, when the subject is entirely steered by the dialectic of violence ; or else by investing against his will some facet of the violence in such a way that it is limited to its consequences for the other : this runs the gamut from Don Juanism to masochism and fetishism, and includes all the varieties of narcissism and voyeurism that are rampant today.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 281-291.