Using clinical experience with radicalized adolescent girls, the clinical analysis of one of them enables the authors to investigate the intra and inter-psychical issues of jihadist engagement. This offers a first glimpse of psychoanalytical thinking about the resonance between propaganda speeches and the trials of the pubertary. Radicalization is here seen as a symptom, potentially offering the subject a new form of protest that is adolescent and feminine.
Adolescence, 2017, 35, 2, 403-412.
By means of a case study, the authors investigate the practice of high-level sports by young “slaves of glory”, who gain access to the position of demiurge through a disavowal of limits and a fantasy of omnipotence. When the reality of the body and of injuries comes rushing in, these champions start by asking for their “performance machine” to be restored, which gradually leads to an opening up of their inner world and to the emergence of complex pre-existing conflicts.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 2, 295-306.
After having the described the ordinary complaints, as a necessity in those days of adolescence, our text, starting from a few clinical vignettes, shows the several specificities of the surge and the therapeutic approach of the adolescent complaint. The part played by a traumatic scene liable to expresse the complaint and its content are facts of a narcissistic cathexes specifically intertwined with libidinal cathexes are thus considered as typical of complaint at adolescence.
This article is a reflection on the institutional treatment of adolescents, but essentially on the place of adults who are involved in it. My practice as a therapist with adolescents in an institution has served as the basis for it; but it is mainly the difficulties that we have encountered with one of the adolescents that have given rise to this initial work. Indeed, this adolescent, with his set of problems, brought out institutional flaws that have to do with the difficulties encountered by social workers in their practice and to their own position within the institution. What do they do within the institution, and what place to they hold in relation to these young people ? The question had barely been raised when it began to create worry and even some aggressiveness. Indeed, it is often a matter of « straightening out » or « correcting » of deviant behavior after an overwhelming demand that the medical-psychological corps « abrade » the symptoms because « you’re not the one who has to deal with them all day ».This response, which is supposed to be swift and thorough, is also one held by politicians in the field of mental health and it is what led us to undertake this work.
The term conversion, proposed early on by Freud, designates the passage of a psychical expression to its somatic manifestation. The author recalls why he has proposed a wider conception of this term, which would extend the capacity for conversion to include a potential that is intrinsic to the symptom as structure. He then raises the question of the status of this notion in adolescence. At this age we see not only conversions in the strict sense of the term, but the long process one must go through often assumes some feature of conversion in its larger sense. This trajectory is commented upon using a case of transitory soliloquy, already evoked in an article about shame, which is related to a conversion of the philosophical or religious type. This serves as an opportunity for pointing out the respective roles played by ideals, affect, and fantasy, the « stranger other », and especially, to be more precise about what the capacity for conversion consists of. It is a spring that ensures the containment of precocious seductions, and of the reactions to these, giving the subject the ability to regress and rebound, to close up and reopen, indispensable to anchoring him in the universe where he is called to live.
The author approaches mystical experience using classical narratives such as Plato’s myth of the cave and Moses’ conversion to shed light on accounts that come to us from current psychoanalytical practice. He shows that mystical experience is an intense moment, wherein the subject experiences in a flash the sensation of attaining the ideal enjoyment that was madly imagined in childhood and plunges in with pleasure, without knowing exactly what is going on. This is also the moment when the flaws and the shadows of early experiences come back to him in a painful way, and when he is in danger of giving in body and soul, since these are so dissociable from the enjoyment in question, which lends itself to symptoms, to addictions, and to passages to the act which are under their rule. It is finally and above all the instant where he is obliged to assume responsibility for the conflicts that result, if he wishes to balance these exceptional experiences, whose hopes he bears in the deepest part of himself, and the reality in which he must invest himself today.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 41-63.
Under this title, a general theory of the social bond is proposed. It should allow for an exploration of the way a subject manages to find accommodation in a living-together, without giving up its singularity, and without putting the social link in danger. We call the logical moment of this solution the « adolescent moment »; starting from this, we try to propose issues and to extract the pre-conditions for possibilities.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 313-327.