Adolescence in the context of international adoption tests the filial bond and generates conflict in identifications. The issues at stake are, on the one hand, identical to those encountered by all adolescents and, on the other hand, more complex. The issues of abandonment and uprooting will necessitate a transplant that is both genealogical and socio-cultural.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 807-815.
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.
A few remarks about terminology (sex, gender, identity) will be followed by a brief review of gender identity construction up till adolescence. The passage from a sort of childhood androgyny to the fullness of sex-specific identity sometimes occurs with some common difficulties; this is also the moment when the possibility of accessing complete and fertile sexuality will confirm or develop sexual orientation. Outside of any problem of sexual development, some adolescents (transsexual) refuse the sex they were born with, which is their biological sex, and request hormone-surgical transformation. Some adolescents have a problem of gender identity related to a problem of sexual development. A « transgender » movement has arisen in our culture, calling gender into question and going so far as to refusing all sexual distinction; this raises questions which are not medical but societal.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 165-179.
The disorganizing and traumatic impact of expatriation on foreign and immigrant students is studied starting from two case studies. The problematics at work with quite a few foreign students deals with the repetition of the puberty scene and related scenarii. With immigrant students, the difficulty linked to the “adolescens elaboration” is expressed through a conflict between loyalty owed to the native system and that owed to the new culture. The task of the psychotherapist consists in granting an anaclisis and protective shield wherefrom the new identity can elaborate itself.
It denies the subjectivity of whoever has to bear it, but reflects mirrorlike a threat on the subfectivy of whoever enacts it. Thus it may be considered as a primary defence reaction from a threatened identity. The experience of institutional life in psychiatry as well as the psychotherapies of subjects suffering from behaviour disorders are a priviledged place to study the latter one. Adolescence is a life stage most liable to expressions of violence due to the nature of the psychological changes that are imposed by puberty. Care should take into account such specificities of the psychological functioning of violent patients. The space for such care should be viewed as a figuration of the internal psychological space of the patient and its handling should be made a means to allow the relationships they need to become tolerable. Mediations and a concrete third function have a very special seat whithin such a handling.
The disorganizing and traumatic impact of expatriation on foreign and immigrant students is studied starting from two case studies. The problematics at work with quite a few foreign students deals with the repetition of the puberty scene and related scenarii. With immigrant students, the difficulty linked to the ´adolescens elaborationª is expressed through a conflict between loyalty owed to the native system and that owed to the new culture. The task of the psychotherapist consists in granting an anaclisis and protective shield wherefrom the new identity can elaborate itself.
A sense of honor is necessary for growing up. With regard to several clinical examples the author shows what is happening to the contrary during the humiliations of the war in Burundi. What mechanisms are at work? What are the uses of the group?
This article explains one of the objects of study of the author; the homosexual process of psychic development.
Such a process includes the double of the self, the primary and preoedipal homosexualities as well as the construction of the fantasy « the female relation with the father » in adolescence (oedipal homosexuality). A clinical example (the extreme femininity of a 15 year old adolescent) illustrates the reflection on the construction and the continuity of the homosexuel process.
By exhibiting his locomotive trail, the graffiti artist invents a city for himself where his identity fantasies unfurl; thanks to these, he hopes to integrate his relation with others by making himself the object of his own practice. Then the street is no longer divided up into “ territories ”, but into moments of history, pieces of time, allowing the singularities that are being tried out to veer towards what is calling from outside. Not a production of works but of what is at work in it, the street sprayed with graffiti exudes the excesses and uncertainties of adolescence by inserting into actuality the figures of an archaistic drive that can be sublimated.
Face-to-face is one of the most relevant therapeutic contexts for adolescence. Adolescence is first of all a crisis of narcissism and identity, and the psychoanalyst’s gaze and what he sees of the adolescent eases the latter’s development and work.Two clinical examples illustrate floating vision: a possible approach for the psychoanalyst intending to introduce the visual or the gaze in the psychotherapeutic process.