Our reflection relates to the articulation between individual psychotherapy and psychodrama. It explores the transference and the appropriateness of psychical work involving several speakers when the process is bogged down in the face-to-face.
The author discusses the paper of Catherine Chabert point out how different theoretical and technical approaches can achieve analogous results. The author suggests an interpretation of the material dealt with by C. Chabert which considers the most primitive and pre-Oedipal needs, highlighting problems linked to homosexual investments and the primitive need to be seen and contained by the mother.
The author observes that in Freud’s work the Oedipus complex is omnipresent but rarely theorized as such; she asks whether the Oedipus complex is characteristic of neuroses or if it also occurs in narcissistic and borderline functioning. The case history of an adolescent girl shows that dependence and prevalence of the narcissistic relationship with the mother may mask a paradoxical but strong relationship with the father. Returning to Freud’s writings (Three Essays, The Ego and the Id), Chabert seeks connections between the Oedipus complex and objectal loss-anxiety, and even more, a consubtantiality of loss and the sexual, which is the central idea of Mourning and Melancholy.
This paper explores some of Moses Laufer’s developments of Freudian ideas on puberty and adolescence. His concepts of developmental breakdown in adolescence and central masturbatory fantasy are discussed with emphasis on their clinical usefulness. The case of a young adult with a postponed adolescent breakdown is presented, in which an obsessive-delusional idea is seem as containing the derivatives of a central masturbatory fantasy.
This paper discusses the clinical material presented by Kari Hauge along certain lines of reflection mainly concerned with issues of trauma, regression, and transference. The trauma to which I refer seems to be related to the patient’s whole life and to her inability to make use of an experience of continuity and stability of being. The issue is discussed from the point of view of the repetition of trauma in adolescence and its manifestations in the analytic situation.
The author highlights the original axes of Kari Hauge’s clinical presentation: which combines an accommodation of the regression of the adolescent girl as in the treatment of a child with an encountering technique based on the specificity of the adolescent dimension – the formulation of interpretations both of unconscious content and of the actual relation between the patient and the analyst. This practice allows for an elaboration of infantile Oedipus complexes re-actualized by adolescence while facilitating a resumption of the process of subjectivation, once the needs of dependence have been acknowledged.
This paper presents the psychoanalysis of a fourteen year-old girl, who had experienced a lack of containing from early in her life. In the beginning of the analysis she was superficially verbal, but gradually she regressed and slept most of the time during the sessions. Sometimes she would suddenly wake up very scared and look at me as if I were a monster, but when she saw that it was me she would fall asleep again. This went on for over a year, and it was reported that she had fewer problems outside the session. Gradually she became more verbal, speaking with a soft voice, more in touch with her inner emotions.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 11-27.
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