Using a clinical case, the author will illustrate the psychoanalytic work that can be offered to autistic subjects, by presenting therapeutic steps attesting to the strides that have been made in the development of the bodily ego. The therapeutic proposals consist of welcoming the autisticizing process and offering accommodations, such as sensorial exploration through touch, sharing of affects, and the creation of scenarios involving bodily shapes.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 179-192.
Few studies in the field of autism up till now have attempted to describe how the adolescent process acts on its subjects. In this article, we offer a reading of some fundamental concepts about adolescence from the work of Freud and Philippe Gutton in light of knowledge about autism based on the works of G. Haag, R. Roussillon, D. Meltzer, M. Rhode et D. Anzieu that help understand archaic functioning.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 2, 363-378.
The authors offer some reflections on the experience of autistic persons’ siblings, and explores the mark the autistic context leaves on the process of subjectivation in adolescence. The analysis focuses on the structuration of body image and on the evolution of narcissistic and objectal investments in relation to the potential for subjective differentiation from the family environment. We will conclude by presenting some suggestions for further research and ideas about prevention.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 429-437.
Helping young autists with new corporal feelings and their fluctuations during the passage through puberty opens up new ways of calming when there is impingement by the drives. The pubertary passage which gives rise to a sensory awakening in the lower body can also help to restart the construction of an unfinished corporal ego and subsequently make the autistic youth more likely to be spontaneously interested in the relation with other people.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 4, 821-833.
Puberty compels the autistic subject to do some psychic work, and doing so via corporeity has integrative effects on the psyche. The enigmatic other becomes the target of eroticized demands. The sex drive is diverted to serve the purpose of an identity/narcissist construction. The autistic pubertal finds its denouement in a fetishist reality beyond adolescences.
The virtual is often criticized as a new addictive substance for adolescents. Here we will take the point of view according to which this tool fosters the elaboration of depressive capacity before their is a playing of the « I » (mise en je) in the real. Screen and body of the subject, the computer would be a first place of symbolization, on the way to genuine subjectivation. Leading to another space and another time, the virtual first allows one to approach in a different way the issue of temporality in its relation to loss. Since loss of the object engenders the « I », how might the virtual be another place where absence can be appropriated ? How can it help in the movement from intemporality to atemporality ? This idea will be illustrated by the case of an autistic youth as an archetype of the issue of loss and the passage from the imaginary to the real.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 417-427.