In the adolescent, an absence or porosity of links with infantile objects causes a crack in the potential for identification and plunges him/her into an unbearable and unsettling feeling that the Ego is uncanny. The psychotherapeutic setting enables the patient to express his hatred towards the mother or the father, within a transference onto the psychoanalyst that makes it possible to encounter another, identified as “stranger,” who is sufficiently different (sexually) and differentiated (narcissistically).
The clinical account is an indirect approach whose only function is to help one get one’s bearings. Through, or more exactly, in the throughways of a trajectory wherein a young man in the care of Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, in a context of complete failure to achieve social or professional integration, I will try to show how a process of subjectivation was elaborated, allowing this youth to reconstruct his present by the yardstick of his past, to symbolize and to appropriate what had until then only been felt. This text is written as a triptych. The three parts can be read independently of one another, but it is nevertheless in the link between them that the specific nature of the argument I wish to put forth in this article will be developed. Each part refers to a reading, a phase of elaboration. It opens with a clinical vignette, a preamble to the reflection which follows. I could have connected the vignettes in a single sequence and developed my elaboration point by point afterwards. I have preferred this (dis)articulation which, in my opinion, better serves to dramatize the case in question.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 765-778.
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