The silent adoption entails a contract between several parties: the foster child, the family social worker, the institution, and the parents. This adoption arises partly from the need for the child to distance him or herself from guilty feelings about the parent-murder he thinks he has committed, and partly from the echo effect that re-actualizes a wound that has been poorly elaborated or unelaborated in the adult. The narcissistic dimension is prevalent here.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 717-731.
Using the concept of the family romance we explore the work of rewriting memory and reconciling affects, particularly in the adopted adolescent, with or without pathology, which enables him or her to move towards a coherent identity. This concept allows us to illustrate how the adoption situation can color the whole adolescent process, without changing the nature of it.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 695-703.
Is the friend a “ same”, a “ model ”, a “ figure of same-sexed investment ” ? These questions are reviewed using two clinical accounts and several propositions. First of all, the Friend occurs within a potential space, a “ between –two ” and is not to be confused with the subject. Then, it appears clinically (case of Sabrina) that the Friend is often the condition of the subject’s encounter with an object of love and eroticisation. Thus there is a triangulation complex implying : Subject, Friend, love object. A series of dialectical operations define their bonds according to a complex mode of resemblance/difference.
The Freudian model of Œdipal triangulation is mobilized, notably through family romance, to analyze the clinical account of Sophie. Desires that are incestuous insofar as fratricidal would have their place in the terms of romantic vaudeville between Subject, object, Friend… We conclude by suggesting that the juvenile period be considered as a amicable Œdipal romance, forged by investments in the Friend and the object. The concept of the coat of arms completes the dialectical process related to the Subject-Friend bond, thus becoming emblematic of what we call Friendship.
In the movie Dans la maison (« In the House ») a professor and writer lives through a gifted student, who himself can live only through people he observes and makes into the heroes of his novels. It would seem that the analyst could also live by proxy through his patients who become, if not heroes of novels, at least characters in clinical vignettes.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 461-466.
We suggest the notion of adolescent romance, to be understood in this way : the articulation of the structure of the family romance with pubertary scenes, as « new » scenes or composition/creations, within a dimension that is more elaborative than defensive. The adolescent romance is not a simple re-issue, but rather the creation of a desiring scenario whose movement requires three logical steps: a switching on of the structures of family romance ; then, the highlighting of pubertary scenes composed of « blazons » attached to the desiring axes ; and lastly, a narrative movement which produces this adolescent romans in the transference in the clinical exchanges. In the cases of Gunther and Celeste, the romances are analyzed, their forms as well as their functions of elaboration and of psychical construction in the service of adolescens processes. The adolescent romance, when it reveals itself in the transference, is specific and is distinguished from the Freudian family romance by the representativeness of the pubertary scenes.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 787-800.