Jean-Claude Elbez : the psychosomatic and processes of adolescence

Adolescence, with its pubertaire and subjectivation processes, is an especially delicate moment when primary traumas are revisited as deferred action. In cases where these conflicts have remained on the margins of representation and have generated psychical defenses along the lines of splitting, the processes of puberty will lead to a return of what has been split off ; where repression has occurred, they will lead to a return of what has been repressed. In both cases, the risk is that what returns will be an unbound destructiveness, paving the way for drive disintrication, or even the “ de-driving ” of the drive, so that it turns into instinct, with the risk of somatic disorganization.