This article looks at failures that can occur in the multidisciplinary treatment of the subject. To protect themselves from the hard-to-tolerate affects that these subjects make them feel, professionals who are responsible for supporting them tend to reorient them towards others. This action, which is supposed to be therapeutic, increases the subject’s feeling of being abandoned and thus the violence of his or her attitudes. This will be illustrated by a clinical example.
The authors recommend a multidisciplinary approach as a way of addressing new forms of destructiveness in adolescents called “unplaceable”. They maintain that it is crucial to consider not only their symptoms, but also the course of their life, the deficiencies and obstacles they have faced, as well as their desires and fantasies. They may thus be able to retain some trace of the capacities for containment and elaboration of the adults they have met in the course of treatment.
An adolescent may transfer his own inner disorganization onto the people around him, causing misunderstandings and tensions to emerge among them. The problematic that the adolescent is unconsciously asking them to harbor may induce great interpersonal violence, with the risk of shattering institutional bonds. Several examples will shed light on the intersubjective mechanisms at work in this phenomenon.
Exploring some primary qualities of a secure bond, we note what, conversely, can hamper one’s ability to get through the adolescent process; we will connect this argument to the clinical situation of Joshua, an adolescent who suffers from psychopathy. This adolescent’s repeated passages to the act lead to a hypothesis of delusion contained by violent acts replaying a traumatic primal scene.
Working with borderline functioning adolescents in a psychiatric institution to create masks using facial imprints helps restart a process of subjectivation. This mediating activity welcomes identifying projections onto concrete supports, the therapists and the setting. Crafts, imaginary creation and scenic play exercise the corporal and group dimensions, and help the formation and reinforcement of envelopes, echoing the primary processes.
How can adolescents raised in European culture take part in terroristic jihad? By demonstrating the return of theological politics and its potentially totalitarian effect, the author shows a possible connection between discontent in the culture, whose specific features need to be establishment, and personal discontent derived from hate and destructiveness.
This article describes a consequence of adolescent malaise that is not well known: the false flags of abuse. A situation in which a young man falsely accused his father explains the meaning of this act, which seems to be the corollary of a pitiless affection. The author argues that such young whistle-blowers have a paradoxical need for support from the adult they are accusing.
In the context of a two-stage treatment (family therapy during childhood, individual therapy during adolescence), this article will examine the case of Julien, the only sibling in his family to have been contaminated in utero by his mother’s HIV. The author will try to pinpoint the genesis of the thwarted hate, as well the process by which the transmission was melancholized, bearing witness to the destructiveness occupies the place of hatred.
The context of the process of adolescence is paradox. The subject is confronted in a particularly intense way with the effects of dependence and the requirement of autonomy. This tension causes a resurgence of emotions that the subject must deal with, and the quest for sensation may be one way of coping. The reflective consciousness will be crucial in shielding the subject from the consequences of a destructive polarization.
According to wounding and frustrating emotional experiences they have met, adolescents at risk will leave behind the field of an object scene in which the haineous experience, warrant as it was of a bond with the object is still liable, in order to slide, regressively, towards the destruction of an object bond and a narcissistic decathexis. Part of the adolescent task is located within the slide hence taking place between the polarities of hate and destructiveness. Psychoanalytic care must be endeavoured in order to keep the liable rehandlings open.
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