The authors’aim, starting from the speech of suffering from which problems of loneliness emerge, is to repatriate this notion into the metapsychological frame of reference, in order to raise it to the dignity of concept and to rid themselves of any purely phenomenological or interactionist vision. The conceptualization of loneliness then passes by the Freudian reference to Hilflosigkeit, psychical helplessness and ontological discontinuity which opens up a dimension of a bond that is other than fusional, i.e., a bond which we would describe as a linguistic link, following J. Lacan. D. W. Winnicott proposes a « capacity to be alone », loneliness which supports psychic installation of the other. It is related to the potential space where the creative way of life of the individual appears. This epistemology then serves as a pretext to question our practice and the tranferential stakes of the clinical encounter. Isn’t this precisely affirmed as the dynamic and creative space to be alone in the presence of the Other ? This prospect should enable us more largely to question the springs of the social bond of which the private clinic of adolescence is an emblematic figure.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 723-739.