The interest of using the haiku form in a writing workshop for borderline adolescents in a psychiatric hospital will be studied through the writings of an adolescent girl. The rhythm and brevity required by the haiku leads the girl to fully inscribe the cry of a memory of an absence, to write what is still missing from spoken words. The omnipresence of line breaks in this type of poem and the splitting at work in the moment of writing will then enable the inscription of her psychic pain.
This article will discuss Vincenzo Bonaminio’s clinical presentaion in three stages: diagnosis and clinical history, multi-focus and interpretation of the trouble of primary identification – in order to introduce a discussion of the differential diagnosis of psychosis and borderline state. From there, we will offer some hypotheses about the use of interpretation.
In a sixteen year-old adolescent boy, the after-effect in adolescence enables us to analyze a dysharmony in evolution that is masked by neurotic defenses. Treatment allows for satisfying symbolization, until a subjectal disorder and delusive episode occur, leading us to hypothesize the existence of a childhood proximity pathology – both incestuous and symbiotic, involving the maternal object – which has hitherto been only indirectly discernible in a feeling of emptiness and evasiveness in love relationships.
The concept of borderline state follows upon concepts of developmental heterochronicity (A. Freud) and developmental dysharmony (R. Mises). It can be found today under the heading of MDD (Multiple Developmental Disorder) in the child and adolescent, and the presence of MSDD (Multi-System Developmental Disorder) may be an early sign of it in the very young child. What is the continuity between these distortions of the baby’s interactions and adolescent borderline pathologies?
Using a case coming from an evaluation and several examples, the author discusses the difficulty of making interpretations to adolescents. The seriousness of the problems is more indicative of the adolescent processes taking place than of full-blown pathology. It requires the therapist to be rigorous and prudent in his interventions and interpretations.
This article suggests that the them of migration be considered as a metaphor for an interior psychical operation : the subjectalizing differentiation from the primary objects, which play a decisive role in adolescence. The issue of the subject is treated within a dialogue with sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers, to the point of envisioning a plural subject open to the diversity of libidinal economies – characterized by the omnipresence of psychical bisexuality and infantile sexuality, here related to gender theory.
Migration introduces one to mixing – ethnic, cultural, but also psychical. A clinical example of adolescent psychical disorder generating elaboration and symbolization of interior strangeness illustrates the hypothesis : we are all migrants.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°3, pp. 661-672.
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