Some difficult adolescents who have trouble finding their place (“mésinscrits”) will call into question their relationship with therapeutic mediation frameworks, which will oblige us to listen to them in a way that is especially attuned to potential play. Studying a case using treatment through the mediation of theater enables the author to define the specular games typically engaged in by adolescents “at the limits” of their subjectivation process. Finally, the author emphasizes the importance of play for the institutional treatment of adolescents who have trouble finding their place.
Archives par mot-clé : Theater
Tamara Guenoun: therapeutic mediation through theatrical improvisation
This article analyzes the therapeutic “site” of theatrical mediation. The group occupies a central place within it, though differs from the therapeutic setting of group analytic psychodrama. The characteristics of the medium of theater use a specific dynamic. This becomes a catalyst for the phoric function. Aesthetic harmonizing offers opportunities for dis-identification.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 117-128.
François Richard : The Work of Representation and the Psychotic Process
This paper supports the hypothesis that the process of subjectivation resorts to a firmness of personal or artistic style when the subject is threatened by psychotic attacks, especially during adolescence. Thought and representation are then seen to intensify in the subject, but it is difficult to distinguish between the excess of melancholic consciousness, psychotic anxiety, and a type of sublimation that is fascinated by drive chaos. The paper proposes a second hypothesis regarding, inversely, the usefulness of a kind of solitude and of masochistic compromise with object and reality. A moment of psychotic crisis in an adolescent girl with a neurotic problem is presented in terms of how the quest for the distinctiveness of style curbs her breakdown. The paper then analyzes the theatrical work of the playwright S. Kane in detail; indeed, here we find an example of the paradox of a suicide that follows successful representational mastery. Finally, we discuss Freud’s ideas about masochistic destructiveness and Winnicott’s ideas about the core of the true self as being non-communication.
Anousheh Machouf, Marie-France Gauthier, Tomas Sierra, Cécile Rousseau : telling stories about play and playing about history as a way of building an identity
The Transcultural Research and Intervention Team (ERIT) has developed an in-school preventative intervention for immigrant and refugee youths. It is composed of a program of creative expression workshops called Théâtre-Pluralité and uses social and theatrical play to help young people navigate among their multiple feelings of belonging and to elaborate their past and present experiences. The goal of the workshops is to facilitate the reappropriation and sharing of the personal and group histories of these adolescents.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°3, pp. 551-563.