Adolescent school phobia is associated with an anxiety so great that the resulting inhibition becomes an obstacle to the patient’s access to a fantasy life. It is often coupled with the conduct of at-home claustration, which calls our attention to the archaic fantasy of the Claustrum developed by D. Meltzer. This is a form of intrusive projective identification that thwarts the oedipal conflict by opposing the differentiation process. We will develop these notions using a clinical case.
At the age when many are beginning to venture outside their family, other adolescents, who are reclusive and have stopped going to school, adopt such a monkish attitude that they stay “cloistered” in their room. Unbeknownst to these youths, the religious register returns in different forms in their treatment. Their renunciation of sexuality and their refusal of the outside world, which they wish to ignore completely, fulfills an ideal of purity – which makes it difficult to form bonds, even therapeutic ones.
The author proposes to decline the word “cloistered” in the masculine, using the treatment of males who withdraw socially in adolescence. To do this, she will explore what is specific to the construction of narcissism, boundaries, and the processing of loss in boys. She will then show how these components take part in the boy’s journey through adolescence. Lastly, she will illustrate her arguments with a clinical account, which leads to the issue of the mirror function.
The movements at work in the therapy of a young adolescent girl who suffered a sudden breakdown symptomatic of anorexia nervosa during the lockdown illustrate the roots of this pathology’s psychic imprisonment: the struggle against excitations, the suppression of affects, and the hampering of fantasy elaboration, like a body frozen in its psychosexual development. The activity of representation can once again take place with help from the transference dynamic, which re-actualizes perceptions and feelings.
Using “lockdown journals” kept by adolescents and young adults, which tell of families living together during the public health crisis and the associated lockdown, the author focuses on the adolescent’s room, its polysemics and the many and varied investments that it can be the object of during a time when an entire family is “cloistered”. Unease and resilience coexist and are characteristic of the “room culture” that is emblematic of hypermodernity.
This article will show what is at stake in the case of an adolescent who confines himself and methodically constructs a place of voluntary reclusion, the place of an asceticism, to the point of becoming a figure of burial on the verge of in-terment anxiety. The text will attempt to provide not so much the description of an ascetic arc – its deprivations, seclusion, and attacks on the body – as of the place where it happens, the place of the asceticism, where the family home is undone and covered up by a new space.
The nautical image of the doldrums that suggested by D. W. Winnicott to describe the period of adolescence illustrates the way that some patients are immobilized. The re-actualization of the Oedipal conflict, when it has not disappeared, will appeal to the Ego and mobilize narcissism. In a treatment center for adolescents, institutional psychotherapy associated with group treatment can help them start sailing again.
The confinement of adolescents is here considered here as a kind of psychic immobility that keeps the symptom from forming. The transference with its binding-unbinding movement enables regression, thus transforming the primordial sadism into erogenous masochism. The pleasure principle can then become a true guardian of psychic life.
Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly is a master class in the masochism and melancholy mobilized in the sacrificial behaviors that underlie confinement in adolescence. The authors show how, behind the figure of the naive and passive woman there is the active Madame Butterfly position that fights against separation. Melancholic identifications with the fallen father who committed suicide make it impossible to give up the lost object and obtain freedom in other way except by attacking oneself.
The author approaches different experiences of confinement in adolescence by way of a clinical situation and several operas. He examines the unique path of Bérangère, sequestered by her mother, and of Pamina, captive of the Queen of Night; also of Siegfried, prisoner of Mime and Tannhäuser and detained by the goddess Venus. These four situations are an invitation to different variations of the reordering of imagos that precedes the investment of substitute objects.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 51-62.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7