Using the psychotherapy of a fifteen-year-old boy, the author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection on the hallucinatory function and its outcomes. When the Ego no longer experiences the hallucinatory image as false, this image acquires an actualizing potential that blurs the boundaries of perception. When hallucination ceases to be a seed for creation and becomes instead a persecutory projection, what powers must the transference deal with?
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 2, 357-368.
Idealization is considered to be among the three components of human love : « excitation, idealization, affection ». This contextualization helps us to understand better the complex and contradictory issues of the ideal. Hope is also tied to love. In descriptive terms, hope places in the future the object of love and primary satisfaction lost forever in the past. In this forward, progradient movement it seems possible to find it again in a vanishing point that recedes eternally, always out of reach. According to Freud, hope is « the hope of hallucinatory reunion with the lost object of satisfaction ». Following Freud, the author proposes a phenomenology and a metapsychology of Hope, which entails a theory of the hallucinatory, raising it to the level of a concept. A clinical example links ideal and hope: hope is born from the diminution of an idolatrous idealization. This disappearance of the hope of loving and being loved leads to despair and, in the end, death.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 151-164.
The outcome of psychotic disorders during puberty depends on how the adolescent and his therapeutic environment make use of the adolescent’s hallucinatory world. When used and worked on within the analytical relationship, the narcissistic part of primary identifications is preserved, and it is no longer necessary to disinvest the Unconscious, as Freud postulates in the case of President Schreber and in schizophrenia. The hallucinatory then becomes a precious tool for saving and expressing desires; putting it into words will help to lighten the economy of the adolescent’s psychological functioning. This is illustrated using two clinical cases.