The documentary The Black Roses subtly shows the complex relations of adolescent girls from the « north side » of big cities, with their language and their sex. Though this provocative language sometimes acts as a factor in social exclusion, it can equally reinforce the bond between couples and allow the subject to manage her multiple identities. At the intersection of differences between sexes, ages, and various kinds of territories – cultural, psychical, political – the use of this mixed language makes possible the creation of an intermediary space, located between languages and between places.
This article deals with the issue of the « mother » tongue of the female child in exile and her bond with the mother during the pubertary process. This is a theoretical and clinical rereading of the case of an adolescent girl who spoke of the loss of her « momma » tongue in relation to the clinical work.
The adolescent passage is paradoxical. On the one hand, the young person positions himself as a subject by and for the rupture with the domestic cultural universe ; on the other hand, he will often return to repressed cultural elements of the preceding generation in order to construct his future. This is a sharp and very visible paradox when we are dealing with contexts of migration, but it is inherent to every adolescent process, whether « migrant » or « native ». This article uses C. Lévi-Strauss’ notion of « mythopoetic language » to explore the translations of this paradox in adolescents’ particular way of modeling language and of speaking.
Through a clinical confrontation, the author shows how the listening is rough with the insistence of the purely descriptive account; and exactly when the dead end of the transference – counter transference is made of a sense of remorse. His analysis unfolds also a heuristics inspired by the language of their meeting and their primary language: Arabic. The latter by virtue of its specific structuration allows some words to assume the shape of metapsychological concepts, and at the same time to be a linguistic rest which open onto a lecture of trauma with an exit registred towards the working out of the letter.
In this article we will attempt to pinpoint some particularities of the psychical movements present in isolated foreign minors, especially the experience of their psychotherapeutic treatment, as well as their educational program. The description of their placement (in this case, in an education-oriented home) will help us investigate several clinical manifestations requiring a reading of the unconscious issues that might be linked to the impact of the trauma of exile. We will see how, in the wake of exile, certain defenses and transference movements are established, implying, among other things, profound reordering of the object relation with parental imagos.
In Casablanca, as elsewhere in the world, children and adolescents live in the streets. They are caught between a traumatic past and an uncertain future. Meeting these children and adolescents, these « exiles outside », gives us an idea of the defective and traumatic environment that they are trying to flee by exiling themselves to the streets. This confers a disquieting foreignness on them, making them seem uncanny, feared and rejected. The street becomes the stage where the environment’s failings can be expressed, the place of survival, of both private and group experience.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°3, pp. 531-540.
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