This article suggests a spatio-temporal reading of the weight contract in the treatment of hospitalized anorexic patients. The weight contract may be conceived of as a form of therapeutic mediation with a temporal aim. To the spatial boundaries of the treatment site combine with the temporal boundaries of one’s weight at the time of separation and at the time of discharge. The relation between the two produces a “weight time” which will echo the patient’s psychic movements towards his parental objects.
The adolescents we see in our combined somatic and psychiatric unit within an adolescent medical service have been hospitalized because their illness and treatment prevent them from pursuing a classic education. Through the story of Medhi and his participation in the « Corporescence » group, we will see how revisiting childhood games can be a way for adolescents to reposition themselves as actors against an illness that, in some cases, de-subjectivised them as children.
The search for origins in adoptive families has mainly played out in fantasy, imagining the history of the child and his biological parents. Today, new questions are emerging in the context of ever more frequent instances where the biological family reaches out to the adoptee on social media. At this point, the real breaks in, forcing itself on the adolescent, regardless of his inward processing of questions about his origins.
Having to leave one’s country to settle in a foreign country with unknown customs leads to considerable psychic upheaval, especially in adolescence. At this time of life, it is particularly hard to confront the griefs and changes caused by migration. As evidence of this, the case of an adolescent girl dealing with painful migration circumstances shows the containing function of the cultural setting.
The representation of a self in adolescence is constructed through a work of limits requiring an intersubjective dimension, notably in the encounter with a boundary-object. A clinical encounter with an adolescent whose treatment has a strong sensory-motor element enables us to gauge the role of body language and the act. The role of the educator as boundary object helps put in perspective the fundamental properties of this object.
With puberty, the experience of time becomes conflicted and emerges from the linearity of childhood. This process is thwarted when school phobia occurs in adolescence without any warning signs. The drives seem to be as frozen just as time seems to stop. In this may be seen a search for immutability characteristic of autistic syndromes. In this case the delayed action, instead of opening the way for temporality, revives a flaw at the origins.
A metapsychological reading of the phenomena of the double bind and psychic paradox enables us to understand how important they are in the psychic (de)structuration of the subject, and to elaborate upon manifestations of transference and counter-transference that they entail, which are a major issue in therapy. Lastly, the concept of paradox enables us to put back to work – and back “in play” – issues of limits and boundaries in adolescence.
The author uses clinical material from the psychotherapy of a psychotic adolescent boy to investigate phenomena of identical repetition, their signification and the possibility of transforming them. These manifestations will be linked to failures in the encounter between the subject and his first environment, at the time when psychical boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, have not yet been organized.
This article presents a theoretical framework for thinking about seemingly psychotic manifestations in adolescence. Between the archaic and the actual, the paradigm of pubertary psychosis frees itself from hasty references to the risk of schizophrenia and gives new value to the notion of potentiality as a process. Pubertary psychosis turns out to have an eminently borderline character and its symptoms necessitate ways of treatment that cover the spectrum of a work of the negative that is necessary but uncertain.
This article talks about the relation between the primal mirror experience and the establishment of self/other limits. A discussion of a clinical case will enable us to appreciate the importance of the other’s gaze as a necessary precondition for the deployment of the process of subjectivation and the construction of a double limit: inside-outside and unconscious-preconscious-conscious.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 135-138.
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