The aim of this article is to understand how, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the group plays a central role in the journey of adolescence. It will sustain the process of dis-investing childhood family relations that seem incestuous, and allow one to turn towards extra-familial object choices. The group and the often-huge investment of it in adolescence ultimately helps one to become oneself and fosters the work of subjectivation.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 233-246.
Through a clinical vignette, we will illustrate how hospitalization in a pediatric-psychiatric unit plays a part in the treatment of young people who have withdrawn from social life. Immersion in the institutional setting, participation in individual and family interviews, group activities, and networking helps remobilize objectal investments and restart the process of differentiation and subjectivation.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 219-231.
The digital era, with its proliferation of screens, gives adolescents a stage on which they can playact their desires and conflicts. The use of virtual worlds, handy projection supports determined by the encounter between one’s own virtualness and that of pixelated worlds, will accompany the adolescent process. The use of virtual worlds pauses the adolescent process, but this can lead to a morbid dis-objectalizing process that prevents the adolescent from becoming an adult.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 89-101.
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.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 2, 423-438.
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.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 2, 343-355.
This article presents the Photolangage®method in the treatment of adolescent acting-out behaviors. It will show how this framework fosters processes of binding and symbolization in a group setting, as well as the effects of a double containment of drive movements, enabling the figuration of traumatic traces from non-symbolized experiences.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 1, 97-110.
Compared with their male peers, girls commit few delinquent acts. But crimes and misdemeanors are not the only expression of violence and transgression that girls must deal with, either actively or passively. The various forms raise the question of whether certain modes of violent or non-violent transgression are specific to females and how they should be handled by the social welfare and judicial systems. This semiological puzzle is an open field for new research.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 1, 13-21.
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.
Adolescence, 2017, 35, 2, 315-324.
This article offers some insights about the establishment of a novel treatment setting for obese girls, which uses the mediation of the body and in which both individual and group issues were played out. This holistic approach combining the somatic and the psychic, emphasizes the way the group supports the containment function in these girls who present an unconscious image of a disordered body.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 151-166.
Group work using mediations can help with symbolization in the treatment of vulnerable adolescents. As with psychodrama, the “found/created” group setting – in this case made up of adolescents from a therapeutic group home – supported by narrativity (maps, fantastic stories, illustrated and shared storytelling) can mobilize an inter-fantasizing dynamic, thus undoing the violence of incorporated traumatic experiences that can stagger the adolescent process.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 129-138.