After reviewing the different axes of filiation according to J. Guyotat, with which the narrative axis may be associated (B. Golse, M. R. Moro), and relocating the issue of psychical bisexuality with regard to the precursors of sexual differentiation, this article will offer some reflections and clinical illustrations of adolescents’ aggression as it relates to identity and narrative filiation on the one hand, and the psychical bisexuality of adoptive parents on the other.
Group work using mediations can help with symbolization in the treatment of vulnerable adolescents. As with psychodrama, the “found/created” group setting – in this case made up of adolescents from a therapeutic group home – supported by narrativity (maps, fantastic stories, illustrated and shared storytelling) can mobilize an inter-fantasizing dynamic, thus undoing the violence of incorporated traumatic experiences that can stagger the adolescent process.
Starting with a clinical observation, this work shows the place that can be taken by a family approach to modes of borderline functioning in adolescence. This place can be conceived of only after a necessary clarification of context when a many professionals are engaged in the situation. The model of attachment, the taking into account of relational reality and the active engagement of the therapist are decisive factors.
The situations of unaccompanied foreign minors are a paradigm for the difficulties that professionals may face when parents are absent. Clinical work requires precisely that the parents be made to exist in the narrative, based on the adolescent’s capacity to narrate himself, in order to construct an adolescence that is mixed, between two worlds. We illustrate this through two clinical vignettes drawn from individual consultations in a Maison des Adolescents, in the presence of an interpreter.
A variation on Freud’s article The Feeling of the Ephemeral, this work stresses the importance of the affect of nostalgia in the constitution of mental activity. Identifying with the nostalgic pleasure of his mother dreaming, the child introjects a pleasure in evoking and narrating his experience, which is indispensable for investing the functioning of his psyche and the mourning-work that is its correlate.
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