Bernard Duez: shutting-off and issues of undecidability

After a short ethnological and historical review, the author highlights the work of shutting-off (or retreating) by showing how this shutting-off requires a scene. Starting with a clinical example, emphasizing the scenic dimension and the notion of the internal groups, he shows how at the moment of shutting-off the adolescent falls into an unconscious contract between adolescents and the adult world. It appears that shutting-off refers primarily to problems of intrusion relating to the original insufficiency of the human subject. The work of the internal groups, oscillating between bonding with the other, appropriation of oneself and shutting-off, has the function of transforming the traumatic state, which the author defines as an ambiguous subjective state that confronts the subject with undecidability, with the impossibility of directing his drives. The invention of the bond of incompatibility is an attempt to emerge from this state and set in motion the work of the internal groups.