Hypochondriac complaints, frequent during adolescence, are a request directed at another and address an object of love and/or hatred. The adolescent is complaining about the traumatic breaking-in of puberty and seeking the witness of others. Hypochondriac complaints are carriers of a massive narcissistic investment. The organ about which the adolescent complains condenses the whole of the traumatized body through genitalization. The body, centered by its multiple complaints, is a place of projection, crystallizing in the body mass all thought, which then becomes meaningless. The hypochondriac adolescent, prompted by a very active underground fantasy of immortality, seems to substitute the time-space dimension of disease for the time and space of human existence ending in death.
Archives par mot-clé : Narcissism
Michael Stora : addiction to the virtual. the video game
The phenomenon of the video game calls for a study of its risks. We have chosen to approach it from the perspective of addiction, since some subjects play video games to excess. We will try to see how the choice of the addiction object, the “ video game ”, reveals a history of narcissistic wounds involving real images but also self images. The video game shows us the anti-depressive struggle set up by the player through an avatar, a narcissistic double who possesses the anal talents sadly lacking in himself.
Thomas Gaon : video games, the future of an illusion
The technology of the virtual produces an area of illusion that is more and more captivating and engaging for adolescents faced with a reality that is sometimes experienced with anxiety. Video games are the royal road into this parallel domain, particularly through its implications for creativity, sublimation and identity. They play out the fantasy in an interactive form that combines activity and passivity. In adolescence, the incarnation of the heroes of video games based on the infantile heroic identification in its narcissistic dimension (ideal ego) would help to compensate for the loss of parental objects. But, the positive and subjectivating contribution of virtual identity depends on the permeability of this ludic sphere. The richness of the exchange between internal and external realities within this transitional area hinges on the real and reflexive presence of the other, so that the circuit of instances in play can be operative.
Sabine Belliard : Gaze and Skin Color
The color of a patient’s skin is something not often taken into account in therapeutic work. The psychotherapy of Denise, a twenty-two-year-old Antillean girl, shows how her color, in connection with her specific history, had profound psychological effects, especially in her relationship with her mother and in her narcissistic construction. These observations about the psychological experience of skin colors in the Antilles are linked to the specific history of this part of the world, marked as it is by the slave trade.
Guy Lavallée : Vision, Thought, Narcissism: What Happens When “Everything Is Visual ? »
Here we will try to posit the relationships between vision, thought, spoken or “ signed ” languages and narcissism in adolescence, such as they are revealed by deaf-muteness. For any deaf person, vision is the object of an over-investment that is both saving and problematic. Its importance need not be stressed, but its preponderance raises some questions. The theory of the “ visual envelope of the ego ” enables us to posit the theoretical issues, and some excerpts from the psychotherapy of a hearing-impaired adolescent bear witness to the clinical issues : narcissistic suffering and the suffering of the thought process.
Renée-Laetitia Richaud, Guy Scharmann : Floating Vision… On the Relevance of Face-to-Face Consultations during Adolescence
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.
André Green : Psychoanalysis and Temporality – Interview with François Richard
In this interview, responding to questions asked by François Richard, André Green revisits his classic works on temporality (La diachronie en psychanalyse, Le temps éclaté). He places them within the intellectual and psychoanalytical context of the period, clarifying his positions on the relations between structure and development, and his conception of the Ego-Subject. This leads him to go further into his conceptions of the relations between borderline cases and psychosis, starting with Freud’s propositions about melancholy, and by the same token, to discuss the technique and the ethics of clinical treatments.
The question of relations between psychoanalysis and temporality makes adolescence exemplary of a psychotic potential whose specificity André Green seeks to theorize, taking into account its social and cultural dimension.
Delphine Scotto di Vettimo, Claude Miollan : Between Shame and Psychosis: A Reflection on Assumed Knowledge
Psychotherapeutic treatment of adolescents confronted with a psychotic experience reveals a characteristic feeling of shame. The first hypothesis formulated here addresses the existence of shame in such psychotic individuals based on archaic experience calling into question the Freudian, and classic, conceptual tool of post-Œdipal structural shame. The second hypothesis postulates that in clinical work the expression of shame as an ontological challenge against the Other represents an attempt by the subject to prove his or her existence. Our reflection focuses, through a clinical analysis, on the double occurrence of psychotic experience and a feeling of shame.
Serge Tisseron : new families and new images : narcissism’s new clothes
Transformations affecting youngsters’ relationship with their own image result from their adaptation to two radically new situations they are confronted with from earliest childhood : the omnipresence of images – most notably those that their parents make of them – and new family organizations in which the desire the child observes is maintained for a longer and longer time. « Being famous » is then perceived as the privileged means for resolving several contradictory desires and anxieties at the same time.
Renée-Laeticia Richaud : sylvie-christine, a reaction
Listening to a presentation of a case of mutism and a family secret in a day hospital, it seems to me that an adolescent girl is managing to make her caregivers live through what she herself can neither experience, nor think, nor talk about. During the presentation, the clinical work goes on like a demonstration: the presenters’ slips-of-the-tongue lead to a continuation of the work of putting into thought, and the counter-transference brings about an exploration of the necessity for audacious daydreams, not in order to consider them as truths, but to free the caregivers’ thoughts from the prohibition of thinking that weighed upon them as much as upon the teenaged girl. The approach to troubles of narcissism and identification may benefit from being freely redloyed in this way by the analyst, both in his capacity to make himself into a good enough malleable medium, and in his hypotheses concerning the transgenerational heritage and the impact of parental narcissism, especially when pain create avoidance of the thought. Once again, a grave pathology gives us an approach to more common problems.