Using excerpts from a treatment carried out during the pandemic, the author explores the connections between the inner attack of the drive and the external attack of collective events shared by the patient and the therapist. These recent collective events may echo some adolescent processes marked by the “internal saboteur” and by repetition compulsion. A transitional space is established where the psychic functioning appears as a third party that can be discussed by the two participants for as long as is necessary.
Using initial interviews with an adolescent girl who presents self-attacking behaviors, the author explores the orders of the vital and the sexual, and the fate of aggressive drives in light of Freud’s two topographies.
The risky sexual behaviors of adolescents with a personality disorder often allow us to go back to a traumatic sexual event in childhood, whether it be an individual or a transgenerational one. As in the neurotica and the theory of fantasy, the differentiating phases of the patient’s history thus become apparent, the time of the primacy of the destructuring experience and that of the memory trace which causes the traumatic experience to be reproduced within an already destructured psyche.
The article situates tertiary processes (A. Green) as subjectivation work. They originate in the link with the first subjectal object, the mother. The tertiary processes have two interwoven components: negative, trying to sort through the power of external objects (work of negative hallucination), and positive, psychic creativity, representance which is shared among three angles of study: affect, internal-external object representation, and word representation.
Adolescence, 2022, 40, 1, 9-24.
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