François Richard’s interest in the treatment of adolescents and borderline states, on the one hand, and the cultural and psychosocial evolution, on the other, are at the center of his extremely rich new work, in which he brings these two dimensions together. The author will attempt to show a link between the increase of borderline pathologies and the evolution of civilization’s discontent, which is associated with a pervertization of the superego (contradictory double bind of liberation and puritanism).
The unprecedentedness of the Covid pandemic helped to we psychic resistances, often revealing traumatic experiences that had been hidden until now. In this context, the traumatic experience has been called forth by three factors: the effect of the lockdowns, the omnipresence of digital technology, lastly the general use of remote consultations in mental health care. We will discuss this multiple calling forth of the traumatic in light of what is understood about the adolescent process.
The lockdowns due to Covid-19 led to a sharp increase in hospitalizations of adolescents for severe anorexia. Though the clinical profile was typical, the investment of hospitalization and treatment was quite unusual. The investment of a space of one’s own enabled a resumption of boundary-work, restoring the differentiation between fantasy and reality, allowing a process of subjectal appropriation to resume, and putting at a distance the traumatic invasion and the oral regression provoked by the pandemic.
Over the past decade some French adolescents have identified with the violent ideology promoted by ISIS and have forged ties with some of its members. As a consequence of this, some are in psychotherapy as part of a court-ordered treatment. Using the treatment of five of these adolescents, we suggest that this identification be considered as possibly representing a “radical solution” to the terror of always feeling attacked.
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.
Here the author will evaluate the implications for treatment of adolescents’ first sexual experiences. These first relations bring forth aggression fantasies, since they embody the link between sexuality and destructiveness in a special way, even when they are consensual. The author hypothesizes that the violence of the infantile sexual permeates these relations, reactivated by the traumatic character that the first sexual relation always has because of its radical newness.
Alban is twelve years old. He stabbed his father. This article offers an epistemological reading of the act in order to remove the impasses of an approach that is too diachronic and procedural. The hypothesis is that a parricidal act can be seen as a fragment of mythic truth presenting the repetition of a phylogenetic metaphor: the murder of the primal father. This metaphor is explored by means of transference issues it gives rise to, especially pertaining to fetishistic identification and to the disavowal of female castration in the primal scene.
When the parricidal fantasy leads to a homicidal passage to the act, even an unsuccessful one, what are we to think about the obstacles to the psychic processing of excitation, which is particularly intense in adolescence? Using the projective tests of Alban, the author offers an analysis focusing on two axes, that of anality and that of perversion. It reveals that the moorings of anality are not structuring and that the capacities for drive-binding have been overloaded by the intensity of incestuous and murderous wishes. This leads to the passage to the act, which is equivalent to an attempt to “kill” the excitation.
A parricidal passage to the act in adolescence necessitates a psychiatric and psychopathological evaluation. After-effects of the processing of the Oedipus complex in particular are brought into play in both the adolescent and the clinicians, in whom the therapeutic process can be hindered by fascination and control. The perverse aspect is present as a defensive organization to shore up the porous boundary between inside and outside, fantasy and reality.
What importance should be given to external reality in our treatments of adolescent victims of sexual aggression? How can we dispense with it in our psychoanalytically-oriented treatments? Using a group treatment and an individual therapy, the author will show how adolescent victims of sexual violence can get beyond victim status rather than staying imprisoned in their pain or in eternal resentment.
Adolescence, 2022, 40, 1, 69-81.
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