Eight years of practice in a support group for parents of adolescents with eating disorders at the Maison de Solenn have led to the following observations: against the risk of being closed up in the family system, taking part in a group, co-conducted by a parent and a caregiver, gives a feeling belonging and enables a “return to society”. The “containing” effect on psychical movements accelerates the mobilization of family resources and the therapeutic alliance. The importance of attachment links that form also enable one to consider the group as a place for mutual aid.
This article recounts the first experience of group treatment of parents of adolescents suffering from mental anorexia at the Maison des Adolescents of Calvados. The authors have chosen a faithful retranscription of productive moments from the sessions close to clinical work, emphasizing the experience of counter-transference.
In the current way of receiving adolescents and their parents at the Maison des Adolescents of Yvelines Sud, the biggest pitfall for the therapeutic staff is the risk of collusion with certain defense mechanisms of the youngsters and/or their families. Such collusions can hamper the work of narration and co-construction during encounters, starting with the representations of the adolescents, of their entourage, their difficulties finding their way and the resources available to them in their territory.
The demand for treatment of school-avoiding adolescents is on the rise, most often coming from the families and rarely from the adolescents themselves. The school symptom suddenly reveals a serious family suffering. Work with the adolescents’ parents appears to be of the utmost importance. Thinking about the flexibilty of the treatment frame and setting up co-consultations helps mobilize the familial and individual psychical resources that were previously unimagined.
The author illustrates how parental resistances can lay the groundwork for the adolescent’s psychopathology. The presentation of a problematic therapeutic situation helps remind us of several principles about the treatment of families. We would suggest that school phobia be considered as post-traumatic syndrome rather than a neurotic problem, while emphasizing the burden of the parents’non-introjected infantile ideals on the development of the adolescent.
This article is based on a study carried out in 2012 by M. H. Calvet on Maisons des Adolescents (Adolescent Psychotherapeutic Centers). Its object was to investigate the place of parents in MDAs, which are treatment settings geared first and foremost towards adolescents. The favored approach is a semantic one: the discourse of MDAs, what they call parents, how they speak of the latters’relation with their adolescent children and with the MDAs themselves.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 3, 455-464.
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