The adolescent can trouble the therapist just as he can trouble can anyone else who cares for him, from the parents to institutions. The specific nature of analytical listening explores what we call the intrapsychic “troubling object” that it refers to. This troubling object needs to be located and interpreted not only in the inner world of the adolescent and but also in that of the therapist.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 383-391.
Images are especially powerful for adolescents and can be a way of expressing suffering. In the often noisy treatment of adolescents there is much to see, without reducing it merely to this manifest aspect. The use of images may also be part of the process of reinforcing and protecting narcissism. Thinking in images, as an intermediary for speech and a procedure that helps construct the psychical dynamic, can be a support for psychotherapeutic work.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 369-382.
Using the psychotherapy of a fifteen-year-old boy, the author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection on the hallucinatory function and its outcomes. When the Ego no longer experiences the hallucinatory image as false, this image acquires an actualizing potential that blurs the boundaries of perception. When hallucination ceases to be a seed for creation and becomes instead a persecutory projection, what powers must the transference deal with?
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 357-368.
Using an example of gender disorder in adolescence, the article attempts to study the unsteadiness of identity caused by confused and conflicted desires when the boundaries between love and friendship are fluctuating.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 343-356.
An adolescent girl’s psychotherapy through psychoanalytic psychodrama raises questions about the status of fictional characters from performed representation. The article emphasizes the importance of reestablishing with objects the tolerable bond damaged by narcissistic withdrawal, and points out how particular objects can serve as vehicles for “psychic bisexuality” and the “primal scene”. Since these enable one to change places, they providing support for the adolescent project of separation and individuation.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 331-341.
The author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection about homosexuality in young adults, using the psychotherapy of a twenty-year-old woman to investigate the outcomes of homosexual transference and its lateralization in terms of object choice and identification. Between the feminine Oedipus complex and the elaboration of the mourning for lost childhood, narcissistic and sexual issues of masochism and melancholy unfurl within a process marked by the violence of the drives and its aftermath.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 319-330.