The term “cloistered” calls to mind Marcel Proust: both the author himself and the “captive” woman that the narrator says he keeps cloistered, obliging everyone to constantly guess the other in order to escape him. In analysis, thinking that one knows what the other is thinking has taken another form: empathy. Owen Renick has invented a game that he calls “cards on the table”, which he sees as a collaboration between analyst and patient. The question is whether this a game doesn’t permanently “cloister” both of them within the transference.
The term “cloistered” calls to mind Marcel Proust: both the author himself and the “captive” woman that the narrator says he keeps cloistered, obliging everyone to constantly guess the other in order to escape him. In analysis, thinking that one knows what the other is thinking has taken another form: empathy. Owen Renick has invented a game that he calls “cards on the table”, which he sees as a collaboration between analyst and patient. The question is whether this a game doesn’t permanently “cloister” both of them within the transference.
This article will study the various kinds of empathy in a support group, in both the psychotherapists and the adolescents who take part. This group is one kind of treatment space in a hospital for adolescents experiencing severe psychological crisis. Data were collected over several months so as to give a new perspective of the group’s chaotic movements and were written up as a narrative.
This article will study the various kinds of empathy in a support group, in both the psychotherapists and the adolescents who take part. This group is one kind of treatment space in a hospital for adolescents experiencing severe psychological crisis. Data were collected over several months so as to give a new perspective of the group’s chaotic movements and were written up as a narrative.
Starting with a clinical observation, this work shows the place that can be taken by a family approach to modes of borderline functioning in adolescence. This place can be conceived of only after a necessary clarification of context when a many professionals are engaged in the situation. The model of attachment, the taking into account of relational reality and the active engagement of the therapist are decisive factors.
The author considers the opportunity of specific alternate moments of symmetric-asymmetric relationship (which are to be contained in a classic asymmetric frame) to facilitate analytical work, and to allow interpretations with an analysand who is usually afraid of dependence, hostile to the Super-Ego representatives, in need of non-declared containment and of a basic contribution to the Self cohesion, as the adolescent patient is.
The clinical history illustrates this specific way of working, quite different from the one commonly adopted in the analysis of adult patients.
For instance, the analyst must be able to temporarily renounce, sometimes for a long period, too frequent and brilliant interpretations that would underline the adult’s superiority, which is hard for the adolescent to tolerate.
The authors attempt to demonstrate the impact on an individual of different psychological functions of the creation of multiple avatars in video games, more particularly in MMORPG. The avatars are either fragmented representations of the self that provide, as a whole, an image of the player personality, or they may come as a crude quest for sensations and motor stimulations. These different relational aspects of the avatar will be illustrated using adolescent clinical cases.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 657-665.
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