The author approaches the principle difficulty of adolescents in a refugee camp: their inability to project themselves into the future.
“ When we began to work with adolescents who have been through war, we observed that their “ past ” was limited to the period when they experienced the war. We also noted that their imaginings about the war were either absent or traumatizing. ”
Several clinical observations support this assessment and allow for three conclusions :
– one must not proceed too quickly with adolescents in modifying their image of the future
– one must not create images for them
– one must not fear their terrible images
Archives par mot-clé : Psychotherapy
Olivier Ouvry : the « we » and the appearance of the subject
Starting with the question of adolescent subjects’ engagement in psychotherapeutic work, we will investigate the passage from preliminary interviews to those wherein effective work is done, through two dialectical points: the intervention of a third instance in the apparent duality of the psychotherapeutic interview, and the passage from « one » to « we » in the patient’s language, grammatically careless, but which we have found to signify the appearance of the subject.
Renée-Laetitia Richaud, Guy Scharmann : Floating Vision… On the Relevance of Face-to-Face Consultations during Adolescence
Face-to-face is one of the most relevant therapeutic contexts for adolescence. Adolescence is first of all a crisis of narcissism and identity, and the psychoanalyst’s gaze and what he sees of the adolescent eases the latter’s development and work.Two clinical examples illustrate floating vision: a possible approach for the psychoanalyst intending to introduce the visual or the gaze in the psychotherapeutic process.
Jacques Hochmann : trend effects and psychotherapies
Psychical reality is outmoded. Hypnosis or learning theory-inspired therapies are now considered to be the only ones that work. Psychoanalysis should study their functioning in order to gain an understanding of their way of operating.
Ignacio Melo : reflections on the role of drive and of narcissism in adolescent psychotherapy
Adolescence is characterized by an instability and a vulnerability of the systems of psychical functioning, within which the drive is oriented towards diverse and potentially changing outcomes. This problematic is actualized in sessions of psychotherapy, affecting their course. In addition, putting narcissism back into play in therapeutic dialogues leads to other parameters, in particular one that I have called « the transitionalization of exchanges », to which I refer in relation to the body. Drive is studied on a theoretical plane, and its place is analyzed in different systems of psychical functioning that one might find in the session. Their swift variations can pose a problem. In this context, transforming what might appear to be an obstacle to the good progression of the treatment into a therapeutic resource seems to me a clinical and theoretical goal. This work may form a basis for reflection, which should be continued and completed in the future.
Arnaldo Novelletto : adolescence and psychoanalysis, confrontation between theoretical models and clinical strategies.
The author deals with the ongoing debate over applying psychoanalysis to adolescent patients. He presents and discusses different theses about the two types of therapeutic intervention, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Yann Leroux : the video game as support for the therapeutic relation
In the past twenty years, video games have become firmly entrenched in our culture. Adolescents find in them spaces in which adolescent issues can be played out and re-played. Psychotherapists have started using them within the framework of therapeutic mediations. This paper reports the construction of a therapeutic arrangement: video game group therapy. This is conceived of as a working apparatus allowing for the stimulation and reception of affects and thoughts. This type of mediation is particularly interesting in the treatment of children and adolescents whose total inhibition initially compromises the therapeutic project. The notion of « ludo-landscape» characterizes a part of the psychical work which is summoned up by the video game. The case of Julien illustrates the work that was carried out.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 699-709.
Antoine Perier, Jean-Pierre Benoit, Marie-Rose Moro : psychoanalytical psychotherapies in a « maison des adolescents »
The « Maison de Solenn – Maison des Adolescents » offers a psychotherapy unit, allowing us to propose to some of them a psychoanalytical therapy. If some discuss the merits of a psychoanalytical work in adolescence, as the articulation of psychotherapeutic and analytical objectives, the arrangements led in the practice by certain specificities of adolescence, join the creative movement of evolution and diversification of the psychoanalytical practices. It is, however, up to the psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to formalize their practices in order to be able to describe them, subject them to the work of thought through the practice of supervision and internal theoretical and clinical exchanges, and to bring them into more general psychoanalytical debates to assure, by the understanding of the differences and the recognition of the common elements, the fertility of the psychoanalytical approach to adolescent suffering.
Jacques Laget : cuts, painting with the blood, glance of the therapist
During a session of psychotherapy, Benoît, 15 year-old, asks if he can make a painting of his blood – painting which he realizes then, at home, and describes in the following session : the eyes of Horus, which he found on internet. He presents a severe depression and projects of suicide, he cuts himself, the narcissistic fragility is massive and the identical problem in the foreground. Benoît claims his depression, says his fascination for its scars, he assimilates his need to see pouring his blood as a dependence with a drug. He wants to cut himself, he needs it, he feels existing. The blood relationships unite him strictly to her twin sister. He says that he does not suffer when he cuts himself, He undergoes in adversity, he feels and paradoxically hardens… The pain strengthens him and there even strengthens the limits of the ego. He so treats his excess big sensibility, signs for him of weakness and passivity which we set against the violence, the power and the strength which he feels in his auto-aggressive behavior.
Glances : his on his blood and painting. The place of the glance, the glances, the eyes of Horus, internal glance of Benoît on his blood which pours, his scars, trying to appropriate a body and a psyche which change and threaten it. Glance of his parents who suffer, he knows that, bewildered, they panic at the beginning, but their glances evolve. Glance of the therapist on his painting, as « adolescent » creation, and resumption of the myth in the therapy. The therapist, the psychotherapy of the attacks of the body, restore a relationship associating creation and representation, opening in the sense.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 355-383.