The advent of Rimbaud as an author happens early, when he is just 17. He is caught in a dialectical argument about acknowledgement with Georges Izambard, the first reader of his poetry. Izambard recognizes its worth and serves as a go-between, without backing out from the encounter with Rimbaud, the suffering adolescent. He is a quiet witness to the turbulences of a teenager and the birth of a poet. Going over the dynamics of the weaving and unweaving of this relationship is of great interest for the study of teenagers.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Psychothérapie III – 2006 T.24 n°2
Anna Cognet : an adolescent in the old days
At the end of his life, François Mauriac evokes a delusive conviction that briefly assailed him when he was about ten years old : his father, deceased when he himself was only twenty months old, would be, in reality, always alive. While leaning on the elements of the author’s life, and particularly his intimacy with the Christian faith, we propose the hypothesis that, for this young boy, puberty was the moment of a psychical trauma, likely to provoke regressive movements, without inducing the establishment of a psychotic structure. Maybe this almost pathological moment would be an attempt to compensate for the father’s lack by means of an hallucinated creation.
Caroline Civalleri : in the course of the writing
This account of the institutional treatment of an adolescent boy, which essentially turned around his relationship with writing, aims to discuss the possibility of the establishment of a cultural work. The different movements that colored the relationship between this adolescent and his reader are described here, showing the passage from a bond with the object to its use in helping to make writing into a cultural object that can be shared.
Myriam Frégonèse : variation on death and the symbol
Invited by his therapist to write as freely as possible, a fourteen year-old adolescent boy treated in a day hospital will tell a story filled with various representations of death. Dan will try to find a response to these, one that is salutary and most often made possible by the summoning up of different fictional characters. His story will finally conclude with a scene where death and symbol come together to finally attempt some structuring discovery.
Renée-Laeticia Richaud : sylvie-christine, a reaction
Listening to a presentation of a case of mutism and a family secret in a day hospital, it seems to me that an adolescent girl is managing to make her caregivers live through what she herself can neither experience, nor think, nor talk about. During the presentation, the clinical work goes on like a demonstration: the presenters’ slips-of-the-tongue lead to a continuation of the work of putting into thought, and the counter-transference brings about an exploration of the necessity for audacious daydreams, not in order to consider them as truths, but to free the caregivers’ thoughts from the prohibition of thinking that weighed upon them as much as upon the teenaged girl. The approach to troubles of narcissism and identification may benefit from being freely redloyed in this way by the analyst, both in his capacity to make himself into a good enough malleable medium, and in his hypotheses concerning the transgenerational heritage and the impact of parental narcissism, especially when pain create avoidance of the thought. Once again, a grave pathology gives us an approach to more common problems.
Hélène Tournaire : sylvie at the center of a family therapy
The family therapy which took place for 4 years about Sylvie, an adolescent who was treated in a day hospital, shows the family’s pathogenic, symbiotic way of functioning, which is very hard to understand due to the trivializing, conformist speech that is produced. Sylvie has always managed to show genuine cooperation with the psychologists and the medical staff so that we have successfully helped her improve the chaotic situation she was in. Now she can describe her own case with more appropriate words.
Isée Bernateau : sylvie, or how to separate from the dead ?
The traumatic death of a member of her family seems to have thrown Sylvie, a teenage girl cared for in a day hospital, into an exclusive concern for the dead. However, this lack of separation from the dead is not the sign of a mourning process in progress, nor of a melancholic bond with an object already lost. It bears witness to a cryptic inclusion of a traumatic loss unelaborated by the former generation. This inclusion generates an incestual bond in the family, which Sylvie tries to process through her obsessive questionings about the dead.
Muriel Darmon : corporal variations. anorexia through the prism of sociologies of the body
By adopting the particular view offered by the sociology of the body, this article places anorexic attitudes and behaviors back into the social space of the body’s uses and representations. The study of « corporal variations » (according to periods of history, social classes, age groups and gender) allows us to see, behind the anorexic body, a corporal model situated historically and socially, one which is at once contemporary, female, and of middle or upper class origin. In addition, the process of corporal transformation that is in play throughout an anorexic career echoes contemporary representations of corporal malleability. It especially manifests two figures which are, however, opposites : that of a « soft » body, perceived as fluid and able to be modified at will, and that of a « hard » body, which tends to « persevere in its being », and resists all injunction to change.
Sandra Lopez, Irène Nigolian : eyes riveted on the sky ali, a case of male mental anorexia
The authors study a case of male mental anorexia through psychosomatic clarification and the specificity of mentalization. They discuss the importance of modulating treatment approaches according to the attention given to psychical movements that can restart mental activity instead of and in place of self-destructive behaviors.
Sophie Vust, Luc Michel : adolescence, eating disorders and the therapeutic group
Numerous requests for consultation for atypical eating disorders in an adolescent healthcare consultation have lead to a reflection on this « new » psychopathology, as well as a suggestion for the treatment within a therapeutic group of analytic inspiration. The question of dependence and of self-reinforcement of these troubles is dealt with, as well as the necessary readjustment of the therapeutic setting to fit both the adolescents and the symptom.