The dialogue environment www. passado.be aims to inscribe the adolescent passage where it is happening: it fans out through the communication techniques of the Internet and e-mail, while safeguarding the essential functions guaranteeing this passage.
Adolescents who register can share their thoughts as wells as their vulnerability, experiences and temptations in the utmost confidentiality. All of these are issues that need to be expressed and find a resolution in a non-disastrous manner. Each participant may choose a pseudonym, appearing as an anonymous double, which allows him to stage his own self and thus learn to tame it.
The role of the third party is particularly emphasized. The plurality of answers and reactions offers an outlet which would not be possible in a classical therapeutic setting. The preservation of the threads of each exchange is essential, too, as much in the dialogue environment, where each participant can return to his original statements in order to re-appropriate them, as in the public space of the website where themes brought out by these dialogues can be pinpointed by counselors and transcribed.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Mettre en scène – 2005 T.23 n°3
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.)
Frédéric Lefevere, Thierry Rochet : between play and dream : balneotherapy as a psychotherapy for adolescents
Once considered a body instance, this instance is very often seen as being endangered by the pubescent process. Inversely, we wish to show how mediated therapies, and in particular balneotherapy, are especially relevant during adolescence, in helping to restore this instance, which, thanks to the psychotherapeutic process, can recover its status as a vector of figuration.
Marie-Hélène Garceau-Brodeur, Mylène Fernet, Joseph Josy Lévy, Lyne Massie, Guylaine Morin, Joanne Otis, Johanne Samson, Normand Lapointe, Jocelyne Thériault, Germain Trottier : concerning HIV/AIDS in adolescence
As a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, children have been infected, particularly through the transmission of the virus from mother to child, but thanks to progress in anti-retrovirus treatments, some of these youngsters have now reached pre-adolescence and adolescence. An exploratory study of nine adolescents in Montreal who are living with HIV/AIDS highlights the particular problems they encounter: the repercussions of announcing that they are infected, preoccupations about revealing this to their family and friends, especially the peer group, fears about establishing intimate relationships or about becoming parents, and about being sexually active and preventing disease. This exploratory study shows some of the issues they are confronted with in their psychosexual development.
Jocelyne Thériault : physical pain associated with body tattooing and body marking
Body tattooing and body piercing are gaining popularity among the young. This phenomenon intrigues and raises questions at the same time. If we put aside the wish to conform with peers that is characteristic of adolescents and young adults, what psychical reality drives them to repeat the practice of body marking over and over, along with the experience of physical pain it involves? Stemming from literature on psychosexual development, body marking and masochism, the position adopted in the present essay suggests that the physical pain associated with body tattooing and body piercing should be placed in the context of normative psychosexual development during adolescence rather than in the context of perversion. More specifically, the thesis developed in this essay proposes that the physical pain inherent to body marking practices is associated with the diffuse psychical pains of adolescence in an attempt to give them sense and to master them.
Marion Haza, Pascal-Henri Keller : thoughts on scarification among suicide adolescents
Scarification raises questions regarding physical and psychological limits, limits between the internal space and the external space of adolescents. They also question the narcissism and the representation of the body. Thanks to interviews with suicidal adolescents, we broached the performance in the real of psychical conflict. Through scarification, adolescents symbolize dividing lines in space, time and in their relationship with others. The thought following the action therefore helps to start a psychical work and restart the thinking system.
Donald L. Campbell : a pre-suicide state in a female adolescent
This paper is a contribution to psychoanalytic understanding of a suicide attempt by an adolescent girl. The suicide act is understood to be the enactment of a suicide fantasy. The paper considers the nature and function of suicide fantasy, various types of suicide fantasies, and the suicide fantasy of this particular patient. The author maintains that during the pre-suicide state the role of the father, particularly the father’s failure to claim his child for himself, or failure to present himself as a friendly rival or alternative object to the mother, plays a critical role in the mind of the patient, and will be manifest in the patient’s transference and the analyst’s counter-transference. An essential dynamic during the treatment of a pre-suicidal patient is the patient’s attempt to evoke or provoke the analyst to collude in the suicide scenario in such a way as to « sanction or to « cause » the patient’s suicide. These points will be illustrated by the presentation of case material of an adolescent girl who attempted suicide during her analysis.
Denise Medico, Joseph Josy Lévy : the first kiss
A significant gesture in social and artistic representations, the kiss is one of modernity’s icons. By means of exploratory interviews and a questionnaire given to university students in Quebec and French-speaking Switzerland, the place and meaning of the first kiss were investigated. The data obtained suggest a set of contexts (kissing game or initiation) hinging upon experimentation and the exploration of techniques. But national factors seem to come into play when it comes to determining the place of the kiss in sexual scenarios, contributing to psychosexual development.
Jean-Bernard Chapelier : « The great illusion » : Party and group process
The party condenses two contradictory expectations : one individual, that is, knowing how to find the ideal in a love and/or sexual partner ; the other, to recover the narcissistic security within the group that promises some incomparable pleasures. The choice is especially difficult because the two solutions have the same consequence: the happiness of « oceanic feeling ». Caught between fidelity to the group and the hope of falling in love, the teenager often opts for a third way, that of the quick search for a trance-like state brought about by the consumption of alcohol or narcotics.
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.