This article explores the issue of self-effacement in adolescence and what it means for the process of subjective appropriation, using an original treatment framework centered on the “drawn narrative”. Clinical work undertaken with a young adolescent girl suffering from narcissistic and identity problems helps us to see how self-effacement contributes to the reorganization of reflective capacities and to re-establishment of the preconditions for subjectivation, supported by the mirror function of the medium and of the therapist.
In an older adolescent with psychosomatic symptoms, the autosadistic symptom of trichotrillomania brings together deficiencies in the Body-ego and its attempts at autoerotic appropriation. These repeated traumatophiliac wounds are a survival method maintaining the excitation of a disavowed maternal absence whose memory traces infiltrate the memory of the sick body. What is at stake in the therapy is the revisiting, in the transference, of the homo- function and primitive auto-reflection.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 587-596.
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