More and more often, we meet patients whose psychical operating process presents difficulties in the process of symbolization and split-off zones where early experiments are embedded, their traces still registered in their first form, which is essentially a corporal one. These traces then return in acted or somatized form. There are therapeutic settings which allow for an encounter, in tune with the patient and the therapist, and help to contain these acted manifestations which consequently are no longer regarded as « passages to the act » by as « passages through the act » in order to be included in the psychical process of transformation.

Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 99-106.