The author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection about homosexuality in young adults, using the psychotherapy of a twenty-year-old woman to investigate the outcomes of homosexual transference and its lateralization in terms of object choice and identification. Between the feminine Oedipus complex and the elaboration of the mourning for lost childhood, narcissistic and sexual issues of masochism and melancholy unfurl within a process marked by the violence of the drives and its aftermath.
Sidonie Csillag is the young homosexual woman patient, an account of whose treatment Freud published in 1920. The treatment of five sessions per week lasted six months. However, it remains, even in Freud’s own opinion, a treatment marked by the impossibility of any encounter with the adolescent girl. We will re-investigate this non-encounter in the light of queer theory and Gender Studies. We will see how issues of gender and queerness can interest psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to the treatment of adolescents.
The camera of Abdellatif Kechiche reveals the body in the throes of the drives and the metamorphosis of Psyche. Through the story of the young Adele, from adolescence to adulthood, the film raises the question of adolescent sexuality, the choice of love object, femininity and homosexuality.
A girl who undergoes passion believes that her feminine identity has been affirmed, as long as it is not recreational, that is, an escape. The effects of passion give rise to many trips to the clinician, not to provide a remedy (nor to calm or revive it, condemn or condone it), but rather to ensure that its form and ethics give the woman-subject access to a feminine identity, which is not to be confused with the maternal.
The revue Adolescence has also been a place of controversy. Through these controversies, the issue of the continuity of therapeutic work in the clinical field of adolescence has been the aim. The confrontation of different ways of thinking provided an indispensable context for the reworking of notions that clinical practice cannot confirm once and for all. This subject is treated with reference to two colloquia, one on homosexuality, the other on psychosis in adolescence. Calling upon authors both from the field of adolescence and the more restricted field of the revue, we complete this overview of notions of controversy and engagement. It is through these that issues of the therapist’s technical and personal values will also be evoked.
Partially liberated in adult discourse, homosexuality continues to be stigmatized in the world of young males, in so far as it reflects that part of feminity unbearable at the age of virility. It signifies how much the discovery of such a sexual orientation in adolescents of 11-15 years old remains a trial to overcome.
The comparison of clinical situations of two men having relations of a homosexual type in adolescence leads one to comprehend nascent homosexuality in relation to the disarray of the adolescent confronted with the language of parental passion. It results from this study, that if the homosexual act in adolescense consists of seeking another self mirrored outside the self, it is essentially as a function of the image of the parents merged into one that constitutes this act. The homosexual relationship in adolescence might not be built so much on following a process of similarity, as in organizing itself around a confrontation with another, different from himself and essentially enigmatic.
Mr V. was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and we met him in the context of an open consultation in the department which receives patients with corporal complaints, whatever the diagnosis. The overwhelming event in Mr V’s life ( his first name means life in FRENCH), stems from a dentist’s root canal operation on his healthy teeth. In the aftermath of this shattering event, an encounter with a man during the same year that Mr V became the father of a son, his words led us in the direction of what could have engendered the psychic conflict and caused the failure of his repression of a homosexuality that the subject could neither represent or integrate. His homosexual passion, unknown and repressed, had led him to a physical and psychic decline as well as to catastrophic complaints contributing to an impasse in a life, up to that moment, without problems. In the staging of his words, the events of the encounter took on a sense, informing him about the homosexuality evoked by paternal words and the failure of his repression.
The impassioned movements of transference are illustrated by the presentation of a cure of an adolescent girl suffering from spina-bifida.
Hate of her pubertal body, fear of not feeling loved, badly experienced secondary identifications are condensed into an impassioned transference as an image of a femininity aspired by homosexuality, between rejection and idealization.
The fantasy of auto-engendering ( which takes into account and gives meaning to the appearance of mature genital sexuality) contributes to giving up the libidinal (sexualized) family investment of the oedipal type (trans-generational) in favor of a sexual investment of the homo generational type. This process of the passage from the family to the social group (of peers) is complex and calls forth varied fantasies in the form of scenes (pubertal, pedophilic, sadomasochistic…) which refer to the internal groups.The fantasy of auto-engendering, denies, at the same time, castration, the primal scene, the difference between the sexes but it develops temporarily what we call homophilia. In this context, homosexuality can be thought of as an avatar of this badly worked through homophilia. To defend this position clinical material (individual and group ) is referred to as well as initiation practices.
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