Psychoanalytically-oriented therapeutic arrangements involving digital mediation have been the object of study for several years now. This article will show how a remote digital setting was cobbled together during the lockdown and the transference and counter-transference issues that this entailed. The effects of a therapeutic framework created using a video game played remotely will be explored in the analysis of the echoes of the pubertary process of the adolescent patient.
Questions that arise around the handling of transference in adolescence always lead to debates about the parentification of the therapist. This article will offer a brief overview in practice of past and current issues.
Using a clinical case, we will argue that the violent sexual act is a condensed expression of an adolescent process punctuated by control and attempts to break free. Based on the analysis of transference movements, we will develop the idea that this act attests to an attempt to break free from (narcissistic and objectal) confinement, an attempt that transference will try to support, put to work, and transform on the way towards symbolization.
The term “cloistered” calls to mind Marcel Proust: both the author himself and the “captive” woman that the narrator says he keeps cloistered, obliging everyone to constantly guess the other in order to escape him. In analysis, thinking that one knows what the other is thinking has taken another form: empathy. Owen Renick has invented a game that he calls “cards on the table”, which he sees as a collaboration between analyst and patient. The question is whether this a game doesn’t permanently “cloister” both of them within the transference.
The term “cloistered” calls to mind Marcel Proust: both the author himself and the “captive” woman that the narrator says he keeps cloistered, obliging everyone to constantly guess the other in order to escape him. In analysis, thinking that one knows what the other is thinking has taken another form: empathy. Owen Renick has invented a game that he calls “cards on the table”, which he sees as a collaboration between analyst and patient. The question is whether this a game doesn’t permanently “cloister” both of them within the transference.
Contemporary treatment brings the patient closer and closer into relation with images, digitalized self-representations and technology in general. This relation has an influence, particularly in adolescence, over the construction of body image, identity and social relations. Moreover, this relationship in turn influences the space of the therapeutic relation. To help understand this, this paper will present six new modes of transference.
An account of some moments from the treatment of an adolescent girl shows how figures of aggression follow the vicissitudes of a “sexual” whose changing forms are explored here, particularly in their reorganization between childhood and adolescence. Transference gives rise to games and traps which summon the analyst to be present in a variety of ways. While the patient wants to play the adult by identifying with the aggressor, very often it is the child she was who is demanding to be heard.
We approach the issue of the unplaceable adolescent from the perspective of a paradox, speaking of the necessary quest to be named by another; this will establish one as a subject. Treating adolescents at Youth Legal Protection, we are confronted with the violence of repetition, but also with powerlessness and confusion. It is essential that the hate of the transference – and in the transference – be heard in order to understand what is at stake for the adolescent relegated to this position of excluded object.
The author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection about homosexuality in young adults, using the psychotherapy of a twenty-year-old woman to investigate the outcomes of homosexual transference and its lateralization in terms of object choice and identification. Between the feminine Oedipus complex and the elaboration of the mourning for lost childhood, narcissistic and sexual issues of masochism and melancholy unfurl within a process marked by the violence of the drives and its aftermath.
An adolescent may transfer his own inner disorganization onto the people around him, causing misunderstandings and tensions to emerge among them. The problematic that the adolescent is unconsciously asking them to harbor may induce great interpersonal violence, with the risk of shattering institutional bonds. Several examples will shed light on the intersubjective mechanisms at work in this phenomenon.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 2, 423-438.
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