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illustrate how hospitalization in a pediatric-psychiatric unit plays a part in the treatment of young people who have withdrawn from social life.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 adolescent process sometimes leads to an anxiety about disappearing, of being annihilated, whose main characteristic is that can be shared – and may even be contagious – among one’s family and friends. In this case, it dramatizes itself, most often casting the body as the principle protagonist.
The postulate of the central place of rhythm in psychical life prompts us to spot rhythm issues in clinical practice, and especially in the treatment of adolescent problems where disinvestment is coupled with suspension of time. Two vignettes from day-hospital practice are offered to illustrate how institutional care can, in its own way, take up the challenge of re-animating the desiring, temporal dynamic of the subject through the dynamic of his internal rhythmicity.