This article proposes the new concept of a primary Oedipus complex that is structurally deformed by the pressure of infantile polymorph sexuality in both normal and pathological development. Correlatively, splitting is considered internal to all repression. A clinical case is used to illustrate the dialectic of an incestuous regressive psychical relationship with the primal maternal object in an adolescent boy and his attempts to make a third-party paternal referent out of fragments of a representation of the Oedipal father.
After more than seventy years of peace in western Europe, one may wonder what becomes of destructiveness in such unprecedented conditions. Perhaps we are witnessing what might be likened to “civil wars”: suicides, family break-ups, the policing of civilian life. After presenting two clinical vignettes, one illustrating intrafamilial wars, the other illustrating institutional wars, the author will compare these two forms and offer some considerations about the difference between individual and group passages to the act.
This article explores the place and role of the experience of sound in the process of adolescence. Through several clinical vignettes, we will deal with different ways sonic identity can be readjusted in adolescence and the consequences of these, for both the individual and the group. We will also show therapeutic work can be carried out when these readjustments cannot be dealt with psychically.
Affiliation is inscribed structurally in the filiative construction of each person. The adolescent crisis is familial and thus implies that the different actors in the process should not be isolated. The Institution, as a specific place for the deposit and projection of inter- and trans-subjective problematics, enables work on the phoric function leading to work of transformation and appropriation.
It can take time, sometimes years, to set up a family therapy, depending on the family’s resistance. Adolescence sometimes reveals flaws in the structure of the couple and the family envelope, which are linked to non-elaborated traumas. A clinical situation shows these processes, which are deployed within the institutional space and most particularly in the link bteween therapist and consultant.
The demand for treatment of school-avoiding adolescents is on the rise, most often coming from the families and rarely from the adolescents themselves. The school symptom suddenly reveals a serious family suffering. Work with the adolescents’ parents appears to be of the utmost importance. Thinking about the flexibilty of the treatment frame and setting up co-consultations helps mobilize the familial and individual psychical resources that were previously unimagined.
The author illustrates how parental resistances can lay the groundwork for the adolescent’s psychopathology. The presentation of a problematic therapeutic situation helps remind us of several principles about the treatment of families. We would suggest that school phobia be considered as post-traumatic syndrome rather than a neurotic problem, while emphasizing the burden of the parents’non-introjected infantile ideals on the development of the adolescent.
»Through a new portrait of his country, P. Almodovar allows us to discover the hazards of the culture of the secret. He centers his story on different women from the same family in their attempts to confront the problems their men have caused them. Each needs to understand a part of her past that is at first hidden and later unveiled. Woman is fascinating, as are the bonds that unite women within a single family. The past returns and recurs in their lives; the fact of facing up to it helps them to make decisive steps.»
The encounter between family and caregivers in psychiatry often has negative aspects for both sides from the start. There is fear on the part of the caregivers that the emotional surge of ambivalence and double binds could disturb a diagnostic and therapeutic practice classically founded on separation, while the family fears guilt-arousing accusation of ill-will that have long served to distance it from therapeutic construction. But an integrative “multi-partner therapy,” in which each of the actors involved must discover their own resources and investigate the mechanisms of their own psychic coherence, has clear benefits, both for the patient’s social prognosis and the prevention of secondary pathologies induced by the suffering of the patient’s family. Still, it is necessary to eradicate the prejudices of the past, which are resistant and insidiously persist in poisoning the natural relations between the inevitable protagonists of any coherent treatment aimed at integration and de-stigmatization.
Transformations affecting youngsters’ relationship with their own image result from their adaptation to two radically new situations they are confronted with from earliest childhood : the omnipresence of images – most notably those that their parents make of them – and new family organizations in which the desire the child observes is maintained for a longer and longer time. « Being famous » is then perceived as the privileged means for resolving several contradictory desires and anxieties at the same time.
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