Using the model of the institution-as-group, this article points out a transformative process affecting individual and group psychic envelopes. The contingencies of the gradual internalization of the setting remind us that for some adolescents the work of differentiating borders and re-establishing a skin around thoughts must come before any focus on repressed content. The group’s self-reorganizing abilities support these changes.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 65-82.
À partir d’un modèle d’institution référé au groupe, l’article dégage un processus transformationnel qui porte sur les enveloppes psychiques individuelles et collectives. Les aléas de l’intériorisation progressive du cadre rappellent que pour certains adolescents le travail sur les limites différenciatrices et le rétablissement d’une peau pour les pensées précèdent la possibilité d’une centration sur les contenus refoulés. Les capacités auto-réorganisatrices du groupe soutiennent ces changements.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 65-82.
Les familles des patients adolescents hospitalisés en soins-études et les équipes soignantes partagent des fantaisies communes de séparation-adoption, de réparation-destruction et de séduction-rejet. Dans cette « constellation adolescente », parents et équipes se retrouvent régulièrement en position d’identification, de projection, d’isomorphisme, de reflet systémique, de résonance. Ces phénomènes mettent les équipes en difficulté mais leur compréhension et leur élaboration est une chance à la fois pour les patients, leur famille et les institutions.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 555-576.
It is standard to say that the psychical work an adolescent must accomplish is a work of separation, in particular with the objects of childhood. In fact it seems more accurate to speak of an adjustment of bonds between parents and adolescent. The former must be neither too lax (otherwise the adolescent may feel abandoned) nor too clinging (otherwise the individual may be kept from constructing a psychical space of his own). An institutional phase in which each, adolescent and parent, will be able to find his place can help in finding the right distance. Participation in a parents’ group at the time of an adolescent’s institutionalization allows for work on the adjustment of bonds.
Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 615-619
Using ethnographic research in two socially-oriented children’s centers (MECS), this paper investigates how rite and ritualization can help fill in for the family. We look at the conditions that foster the appearance and use of rites and observe how these can serve as tools to promote social inclusion and participation, in combination with moral and educational culture. We hypothesize that “wild” psychologization of problems by professionals and the nearly exclusive recourse to clinical psychologists to regulate difficulties in such institutions leads to an under-valuation of the interest and effectiveness of rituals, in favor of the “talking cure” alone.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 169-179.
The observation of human suffering often takes place from distance achieved by disavowing emotional states which, nevertheless, often seem decisive for the observer. This paper will attempt to investigate this hypothesis using the example of a research-intervention mission in an institution for adolescents living through familial break-up. Deeply troubled by the strangely disaffected voice of an adolescent girl, the observer is obliged to drop the distanced attitude of the expert. What bothers him is not the history of this young girl, but what it recalls of his own family experience, which gets mixed up with scientific observation. The return to this “unconscious of the observation” forms the basis of what we could call an initiation.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 145-152.
Adolescence, a recent category peculiar to the West, tends to disunite puberty as a universal physiological event. It is not so much the disappearance of rites that is in play here, as the extenuation of the bond of solidarity between the phenomenon of puberty and the social designation – and treatment – of adolescence. Using the example of self-harming practices in adolescence, I would like to hypothesize an increase in acts/symptoms is fed by this separation and tends, paradoxically, to reduce it – i.e., reassert a social and private recognition of identity of the forms of otherness engaged by puberty – and at the same reject these same forms of otherness.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 47-56.
François and his father, sharing a first name, form a duo with paranoiac functioning. With the onset of puberty, this system broke down. François was treated in a day hospital. The institutional psychoanalytic psychotherapy offers necessary flexibility, especially salutary opportunities to adapt the treatment setting. This work carried out as a team helped to develop a particular approach to this family.
This article is a reflection on the institutional treatment of adolescents, but essentially on the place of adults who are involved in it. My practice as a therapist with adolescents in an institution has served as the basis for it; but it is mainly the difficulties that we have encountered with one of the adolescents that have given rise to this initial work. Indeed, this adolescent, with his set of problems, brought out institutional flaws that have to do with the difficulties encountered by social workers in their practice and to their own position within the institution. What do they do within the institution, and what place to they hold in relation to these young people ? The question had barely been raised when it began to create worry and even some aggressiveness. Indeed, it is often a matter of « straightening out » or « correcting » of deviant behavior after an overwhelming demand that the medical-psychological corps « abrade » the symptoms because « you’re not the one who has to deal with them all day ».This response, which is supposed to be swift and thorough, is also one held by politicians in the field of mental health and it is what led us to undertake this work.
The aim of this article is to offer some thoughts about the place of the pharmacological prescription within the framework of the institutional treatment of children and adolescents who present severe psychological disorders. Far from being a simply technical approach, prescribing medication to an adolescent within an institution corresponds to the construction of a transitional space which is the fruit of the encounter between the adolescent and the staff. The action of the psychotropic drugs must be inscribed in the overall psychical economy of the subject, taking into account the relationship between medication and the question of dependence and the inevitable issues of mastery and control that this engenders in adolescence, which are amplified by the institutional setting. Lastly, it is important to emphasize that this problematic must not be seen as confined to the specific institution which receives the adolescent, but applies more widely to the different institutions and referents which deal with the adolescent in the perspective of a multi-focus treatment among institutions and a longitudinal and parallel conception of treatment.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 769-777.