This paper is a contribution to psychoanalytic understanding of a suicide attempt by an adolescent girl. The suicide act is understood to be the enactment of a suicide fantasy. The paper considers the nature and function of suicide fantasy, various types of suicide fantasies, and the suicide fantasy of this particular patient. The author maintains that during the pre-suicide state the role of the father, particularly the father’s failure to claim his child for himself, or failure to present himself as a friendly rival or alternative object to the mother, plays a critical role in the mind of the patient, and will be manifest in the patient’s transference and the analyst’s counter-transference. An essential dynamic during the treatment of a pre-suicidal patient is the patient’s attempt to evoke or provoke the analyst to collude in the suicide scenario in such a way as to « sanction or to « cause » the patient’s suicide. These points will be illustrated by the presentation of case material of an adolescent girl who attempted suicide during her analysis.
Archives par mot-clé : Splitting
Stefano Bolognini : the bar in the desert, symmetry et asymmetry in the treatment of difficult adolescents
The author considers the opportunity of specific alternate moments of symmetric-asymmetric relationship (which are to be contained in a classic asymmetric frame) to facilitate analytical work, and to allow interpretations with an analysand who is usually afraid of dependence, hostile to the Super-Ego representatives, in need of non-declared containment and of a basic contribution to the Self cohesion, as the adolescent patient is.
The clinical history illustrates this specific way of working, quite different from the one commonly adopted in the analysis of adult patients.
For instance, the analyst must be able to temporarily renounce, sometimes for a long period, too frequent and brilliant interpretations that would underline the adult’s superiority, which is hard for the adolescent to tolerate.
Monique Schneider : between the object and the witness, the friend
Friendship is first conceived of as being situated at the origins of psychoanalysis. The bond forming being Freud and W. Fliess represents an anaclitic structure, permitting a overlapping between two dimensions of the human – life and mind – or between two disciplines applying themselves to the knowledge of one level of the real: biology and psychology. Sharing between these two realms is also found in the “ narcissisitic self-splitting ” studied by S. Ferenczi, which helps to understand the role played by trauma, whether in the birth of a friendship or in its breaking-off.
The analysis of the couple formed by Freud and E. Silberstein will show another structure: within it the friend becomes the confidant to whom is confided the confession of links formed outside the area of friendship. The confidant to whom these links – Freud then speaks of Gisela Fluss – are offered as so many sacrifices.
Nicole Calevoi: a tiger with the psychodrama : articulation between a psychotherapy and the psychodrama
Our reflection relates to the articulation between individual psychotherapy and psychodrama. It explores the transference and the appropriateness of psychical work involving several speakers when the process is bogged down in the face-to-face.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 91-98
Denis Hirsch : constructions and interpretations in adolescence : from the future anterior to the re-composed past
Transferences in adolescence are not just regressive and infantile, but also progressive and pubertary. The puberty traumatic economy requires some time to construct an intermediary space out of a shared narrativity that transforms non-figurable pubertary experiences into scenarios that can be shared. The adolescent’s narratives are revisited as creations not to be interpreted as such, at least not at first. The analyst’s constructions upon this intermediary narrative object leave open the possibility of a narrative revisiting, found-created by the adolescent, without having to pronounce on its origin, in a game of active mastery for him. This phase is necessary to assure a subjectivizing narrative identity. The risk of a splitting of narcissistic and objectal transferences, and of an avoidance of « classical » interpretive work, is highlighted. The work of construction implies in the analyst a counter-transference work on the adolescent in the analyst and on his « adolescent sexual theories ».
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°4, pp. 1027-1037