Drawing from clinical work with adolescents in a home for troubled children (MECS), which confronts us with the absence of a treatment demand as well as with the kind of bonding that is prone to narcissistic seduction, incestuality, and omnipotence, we investigate the kinds of framework that could enable us to engage a therapeutic process. To this end, we present a definition of the “triple echo” setting and illustrate its potential effects and tools by means of the situation of a fifteen-year-old adolescent boy
This article will study the various kinds of empathy in a support group, in both the psychotherapists and the adolescents who take part. This group is one kind of treatment space in a hospital for adolescents experiencing severe psychological crisis. Data were collected over several months so as to give a new perspective of the group’s chaotic movements and were written up as a narrative.
This article will study the various kinds of empathy in a support group, in both the psychotherapists and the adolescents who take part. This group is one kind of treatment space in a hospital for adolescents experiencing severe psychological crisis. Data were collected over several months so as to give a new perspective of the group’s chaotic movements and were written up as a narrative.
After having analyzed in depth a file coming from Africa, the author gathers the characteristics of adolescents in Benin, Niger, Ivory Coast, Senegal, ZaÔr, Burkina Faso and some African migrants in France. If these adolescents, for most of them, seem to share the very same psychological problems as their French contemporaries, theory, as far as it is concerned, remains deeply influenced by the French but also is only too little influenced by the sociological specificities of these countries.
The anorexic figures and illustrates the culture of anti-consumption and individualism, but the fascination it provokes goes well beyond this. It is exploited by television programs for its expressive strength as an enigma, the « golden cage » (Bruch), the mystery and the power of what appears to be choice of rupture with the family, with other adolescents, and with oneself. A heroic and sometimes deadly choice that is perceived as an accusation.
Multiple interpretations of mental anorexia according to some aspect of mores and models communicated by the dominant culture tend to deny its psychopathological specificity. Cultural and family factors, and traumatic events, are cited all the more in cases of minor forms of anorexia, or hysterical anorexia.
The spectacle of this supposedly deliberate choice, that of turning one’s back on the most basic and legitimate satisfactions, in order to risk death through the excesses of restrictive behavior involving more than just food, distracts attention from what psychoanalytical practice has shown: the strength of the anachronic affective demand (which can find a dangerous outlet in cases of bulimia) and of ambivalence in the relationship with the parents, and especially the mother, depending on the background of infanthood. This would explain why we find in the entourage, in proportion to the anxiety anorexia gives rise to, reactions amounting to a disavowal of meaning: there is nothing to understand, it’s a sickness, a brain abnormality. Though anorexics may refuse to be force fed, they do ask to be listened to ; behind the façade of a thin body fetish lies an upset and a demand to be heard.
If in the past pathological figures of the religious in part issued from the question of excessive ritualization (the obsessive side of religion highlighted by Freud), couldn’t one affirm that the model of the religious is today a narcissistic one ? For the essential is no longer the aspect of control (defence against death anxiety) of the religious (the obsessive type), or the search, under the sign of lack, for the never obtained object of mystical desire (along hysterical lines), but a validation through faith that is always unfulfilled in itself, and the subject’s correlative struggle against abandonment anxiety and the loss of the bond. From this perspective, we will explore the work of the negative at work in postmodern mysticism, in which the performing aspect of believing navigates between the void of abandonment and the figures of the religious space that it must create.
Le psychical phase of adolescence necessarily confronts the subject with the de-idealization of childhood gods, those that the child created for himself because of his fundamental dependence. Now, the postmodern social bond has changed the status of social gods, so that mystical adolescent passion is no longer a symbolic “ assumption ” of these, in the form of an interiorized ego ideal, but rather an “ incarnation ” in reality of the gods that sustain an ideal ego, in keeping with the divinisation of the human promoted by postmodern liberalization. The mystical passion of the adolescent thus takes the new forms attested to by current adolescent psychopathology.
Psychoanalytical psychopathology sheds light on the technique of packing. But recent neurophysiological, developmental, psychopathological and institutional studies have come together to enable this treatment practice to construct a psychotherapeutic setting for autistic and psychotic children and adolescents, as long as this is part of a complex institutional structure that takes into account all aspects necessary to the care of the patient in question. The vehement attacks of its detractors are put into perspective by the good clinical results it produces, about which a program of clinical research will issue a report in the coming months.
« Discontent in society » is less a point of departure than a problem that needs to be elaborated and clarified. The author suggests replacing the individualistic ideal that society causes psychical suffering be replaced with the sociological idea that psychical suffering is today an obligatory, that is, expected, way of expressing of social suffering. This leads him to the hypothesis that in the area of mental health, we are witnessing a generalization of the use of personal idioms to give form to and resolve conflicts in social relations. These language games consist of making a connection between personal unhappiness and disrupted social relations using the yardstick of psychical suffering, thus bringing together individual suffering and shared suffering. From there, he develops the hypothesis that, obscured by the malaise, a equality crisis is being played out in the French style, that is, a crisis of an equality that is conceived essentially in terms of protection, and a protection in terms of status, according to the model of public functioning, while today’s equality, and thus the struggle against social inequality, is played out in terms of capacity.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 553-570.
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