Drawing from clinical work with adolescents in a home for troubled children (MECS), which confronts us with the absence of a treatment demand as well as with the kind of bonding that is prone to narcissistic seduction, incestuality, and omnipotence, we investigate the kinds of framework that could enable us to engage a therapeutic process. To this end, we present a definition of the “triple echo” setting and illustrate its potential effects and tools by means of the situation of a fifteen-year-old adolescent boy
This article explores the issue of self-effacement in adolescence and what it means for the process of subjective appropriation, using an original treatment framework centered on the “drawn narrative”. Clinical work undertaken with a young adolescent girl suffering from narcissistic and identity problems helps us to see how self-effacement contributes to the reorganization of reflective capacities and to re-establishment of the preconditions for subjectivation, supported by the mirror function of the medium and of the therapist.
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.
This article presents experiments and research results connecting psychoanalysis, gender studies, and public health with the effects of sexual and identity binarism and with the new developments produced by transformations and advances in law and citizenship. In this context, we have found the shattering of patriarchal representations and of the adult-centered gaze in relations between genders and generations.
Current transformations of sexed subjectivities confront psychoanalytic theory and practice with the inadequacy of certain canonical categories for understanding the dissidences of sexuality. Trans identies, trans sexualities, tranvestitisms, transgenders, fluid and non-binary subjectivities in contemporary adolescences, all give rise to a crisis in patriarchal narratives and call out the cis-hetero-normative imagination of psychoanalysis.
The reflections presented in this article are the result of ten years of clinical work with gender-diverse Brazilian adolescents in public and private outpatient treatment. Working with these adolescents makes psychoanalysts reconsider the fundamental principles or the theory that inspires them. In this respect, de-pathologizing and paying attention to the unique stories of transgender adolescents can greatly enrich the discussion.
In the context of the treatment of transgender and non-binary adolescents in a public psychological service in Brazil from 2022 to 2023, the author met youths with mental health issues who identified as trans during the coronavirus pandemic. She analyzed two clinical vignettes in which the adolescents made threats against their parents if the latter would not give permission for their child’s hormone treatments. The article offers some reflections on possible clinical strategies for handling such situations.
An adolescent’s demand for support in undertaking medical transitioning goes against traditional psychoanalytic theories. In this article, the author gives an overview of the metaphors that occur most frequently in discussions about gender transitioning. Through the notions of contagion, naturalness of gender, and amputation, he will attempt to reveal the anxieties of analysts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the anxieties of the psychoanalysis as a theoretical field.
Using the subjective experience of the protagonists of the film Wolf & Dog (2023), the authors focus on the adolescent gender exploration on an island that is supposed to be totally cut off from globalization. Evolving in an area far from the society of consumption, where do these youth get their tendency to explore gender, which they do under the sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile eye of adults? How do the inhabitants of the island return – or not – to the normative systems set up by religious tradition?
Today, the adolescent’s search for identity meets with new suggestions in terms of identification. By disentangling the issue of gender from that of sex, gender theories open up new perspectives for individual affirmation, thus opening up “man/woman” and “homosexual/heterosexual” binarities to other variations. The possibility of “choosing your gender” thus encounters the adolescent demand for the “right to self-determination”.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 2, 353-365.
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