Based on analysis with adolescent girls and young women, the author revisits and updates the essence of the analytic relationship between the psychoanalyst and the “young girl”. Alerted by a prolonged period of bisexuality and the force of collapsus between shame and guilt, C. Chabert describes the effects of transference on the analyst’s body, and the variability of traces of this transference. This variability allows the analyst to be able to « with[stand] the journey through depression and the confrontation with displeasure, without which, there cannot truly be analysis! ».
A teenager followed in a day hospital presents transitory behavior that causes an « hysterization » of the counter-transference in certain women who deal with him. This behavior is linked with the sexual traumatic problems present in his family. It allows him to remobilize drive activity experienced as threatening for his psychical integrity, and to interiorize the female components of this drive activity.
The author argues that, according to their degree of omnipotence and their degree of ego identification, manic defences (Klein, 1934) can either open or close access to bisexuality that is harmonious enough to preside over one’s passage through psychical puberty. This study starts off with historical and metapsychological references relating to the fundamental concepts of melancholy, mania and manic defences. Afterwards, the author links the title concept of manic defences to Œdipal conflicts and conflicts over dependence and separation, all of which are inherent to psychical puberty. In so doing, he differentiates, insofar as these conflicts are concerned, their pathological stumbling blocks from the turbulences they ordinarily stir up. In the course of the article, there is a specification of the bonds of interdependence that psychical puberty and manic defences conjointly maintain with the notion of dependencies – normal, mixed, or negative – and the feeling of sexual identity, of belonging to one sex or the other.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 221-236.
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