This article will discuss Vincenzo Bonaminio’s clinical presentaion in three stages: diagnosis and clinical history, multi-focus and interpretation of the trouble of primary identification – in order to introduce a discussion of the differential diagnosis of psychosis and borderline state. From there, we will offer some hypotheses about the use of interpretation.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 4, 837-848.
In this article new forms of contradiction-conflict resulting from changes in the perception of limits that psychoanalysts encounter in their practice today are conceived from the perspective of the notions of work of the negative and of subjectivation
In this interview with Raymond Cahn, the interviewers essentially used Adolescence et folie (PUF, 1991) as a guideline. Four successive points of view explored Cahn’s conceptions of adolescence: from the respective angles of the subject, of the object, of the internal-external family, and of the therapeutic institution.
The postural straightening (Aufrichtung) of our ancestors marks, according to Freud, the beginning of the process of Kultur. This rising up echoes a rite in the relation with the earth (and otherwise universal) : the father lifting his son from the ground to recognize him. Athenian ceramists represent this second figure as a teenager and philosophy illustrates this gesture as a native political structure. The author suggests this intrinsic double valence (recognition and submission), which binds this arbitrary father and his adolescent son as a kind of a metaphor for the birth of politics. The aim is both to identify the violence inherent to a political project and its necessary collective management, bound to this ancient complicity with the Earth of origins, from which we must necessarily free ourselves.
Freud has left us a theory of fraternal rivalry from his self-analysis. For him, the fraternal is the paternal displaced. Conflicts born of fraternal rivalries are related to the Oedipus complex. Lacan has shown how jealousy between brothers and the conflicts of rivalry have as much to do with a mental identification as with a vital rivalry. The rival plays, in effect, the role of an identificatory image that allows the subject to be constituted. The question of narcissism, particularly the narcissism of small differences, appears as central. How do small differences call into question the ideal ego of the group and the ideal passed on from generation to generation? How can the origin be shared? These are the questions that this article proposes to examine in discussing the works of a number of authors, in particular those of Gilbert Diatkine and Daniel Sibony.
The outcome of psychotic disorders during puberty depends on how the adolescent and his therapeutic environment make use of the adolescent’s hallucinatory world. When used and worked on within the analytical relationship, the narcissistic part of primary identifications is preserved, and it is no longer necessary to disinvest the Unconscious, as Freud postulates in the case of President Schreber and in schizophrenia. The hallucinatory then becomes a precious tool for saving and expressing desires; putting it into words will help to lighten the economy of the adolescent’s psychological functioning. This is illustrated using two clinical cases.
The possible paths that the affects of one’s love life may take, starting with the moment when the object is born, then as an investment of oneself and the other, and finally in so-call mature love, are blended together in numerous forms and in the intensity of transference love. Starting with the dynamic between transference and counter-transference at work in the analysis of Antonella, we will see how clinical work sheds light on the many vicissitudes adolescents go through, their infinite symptomatic solutions, the countless pains of their love life, which are linked to their fidelity to the primary identification, to the strength of this loved and hated bond, but also, at the same time, to the reactivation of the process of subjectalization and subjectivation.
The author suggests some lines of reflection about the mystery and phenomenon of death. One must indeed distinguish, as the Romans did, between mortalis, moribundus, moriens, and mortuus. This distinction is essential for enabling an organization of research on the intimate bond between conception, the primal, and the « ancient fear ». Relying also on clinical experience, the author points out that the concept of primary identification is essential to reading analytically the specific psychical activity that is called the work of trespass. The dying person does tend to form a last dyade with his caregiver, the last depository of the transference, along the model of the early relation with the mother.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 147-159.