The authors will attempt to show that group psychodrama is a treatment format particularly suited to adolescents, who may not always find it easy to verbalize. The analysis of a psychodramatic game will illustrate how this form of treatment can help restart the inter-binding drive and support scenic thought grounded in the relational action itself.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 521-531.
Is there such thing as psychoanalysis of the adolescent ? Two points of view will be refuted, one which considers adolescence as the moment of repression after-the-fact and one which is frightened of the danger of enflamed passions in a two-person clinical situation. The history of theoretical elaborations about adolescence introduces one to a conception of the encounter between the psychoanalyst and the adolescent that can shed light on psychoanalytical practice with the adult.
The Freudian method of interpreting drive conflict and the transference is applicable with the adolescent, as is demonstrated by the treatment of a young adolescent presenting anorexic and addictive disorders. Here borderline ways of functioning correspond to contra-phobic projective defenses, repression being covered by splitting.
Some hypotheses are advanced concerning current adolescent and young adult pathologies (paradoxical recourse to forms of excitation meant to de-sexualize, externalization of psychical interiority) in a context of « civilization and its discontents ».
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 245-270.
This article considers the specificity of current adolescent pathologies (ways of functioning using unlimited primary processes, externalization of intrapsychical conflicts, recourse to the act, to violence and to self-calming excitation) from the perspective of the complexity of the Psyche, which is able to combine Oedipal drive conflict with the archaic problematic. These are the modalities of analytic work which must be investigated. Hypotheses about the intersubjective encounter in the session, and about a necessary overcoming of the opposition between narcissism and object relation, are offered in order to foster thinking about alterity.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 67-78.