This article looks at failures that can occur in the multidisciplinary treatment of the subject. To protect themselves from the hard-to-tolerate affects that these subjects make them feel, professionals who are responsible for supporting them tend to reorient them towards others. This action, which is supposed to be therapeutic, increases the subject’s feeling of being abandoned and thus the violence of his or her attitudes. This will be illustrated by a clinical example.
The authors approach issues of criminal acts in adolescence through the lens of a theatrical therapy. They suggest some ways of understanding the work these adolescents do re-actualizing old scenes that await symbolization. Performing on stage remains at the service of figurability. It is an attempt to free the adolescent’s Ego from ambiguity by addressing the remains of traumatic experiences in the deferred action.
Starting with the definition of incasables (unplaceables) in specialist literature, the author will focus on the drive sources of the violent and asocial behaviors of these youths living on the margins of the medico-social system. The article combines metapsychological reflection about trauma with a clinical case that illustrates in a particular way the pitfalls of a life strewn with obstacles and shows the hopes as well as the limits of outpatient psychotherapeutic work.
Fighting against radical evil entails not only the incarceration of jihadists – although this is a necessary response – or a social response – just as necessary – such as helping youths from these neighborhoods escape from poverty. The fight against radical evil requires even more that we be attentive to the adolescents’ diseases of ideality and unbinding and that we respond to their need to believe so that the seductiveness of religions will cease to be a threat to humanism.
The authors recommend a multidisciplinary approach as a way of addressing new forms of destructiveness in adolescents called “unplaceable”. They maintain that it is crucial to consider not only their symptoms, but also the course of their life, the deficiencies and obstacles they have faced, as well as their desires and fantasies. They may thus be able to retain some trace of the capacities for containment and elaboration of the adults they have met in the course of treatment.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 2, 251-255.
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