Archives de catégorie : ENG – Construction – 2010 T.28 n°4

BERNARD ALIX : AMADOU’S SEPARATIONS

This article recounts individual psychotherapeutic work undertaken with a deaf adolescent, in the specialized institution where he was received, and shows to what extent adolescence can be a violently disorganizing crisis, but also a time when new resources can be mobilized. Separated from his family since the age of four years and ten months on account of his handicap, his entry into puberty brings the issue of this estrangement to the forefront. At this moment, Amadou evokes different versions of the separation, genuine « scènes pubertaires (pubertary scenes) » (Gutton, 1991) in which the childhood event is made present, the violence of this event linking it to the violence of puberty. The crisis he goes through is an opportunity to elaborate the childhood trauma, to find and investigate supports offered by his environment – psychotherapy, the institution, and the family. This case study helps us to reflect more generally upon the Oedipal issues of separation, the visit from his parents at the acme of his crisis having enabled him to get more involved in an adolescens process (Gutton, 1996). This work also provides an opportunity to study the work of anthropologists and psychoanalysts (Emy, 1972, 1988 ; Ortigues, 1966) whose work sheds precious light on the child’s separation from the mother and the family, and on the specific characteristics of the organization of the Oedipus complex in an African milieu.

LE BRETON DAVID: ADOLESCENCE AND THERAPEUTIC TREATMENT

Risk taking behaviours are a way for the teen to fight against it suffering. Resolution are numerous. They include cultural practices such as theatre, music, sport, etc. or encounters. Analytic psychotherapy is worth for the teen that accept this principal. But it involves some adjustment of the setting, and an involvement of the psychotherapist. The quality of relation is as important as the content of the words exchanged.

GUTTON PHILIPPE: PERLABORATING IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT

When adolescent creativeness is unable to reconstruct the I-Ego taking into account the newness of puberty, the psychoanalyst must invent a specific practice : construction work with which the adolescent can identify. When adolescent creativeness is unshared and unable to be shared, the treatment should offer common ground where a two-person perlaboration can develop, in which the conditions (usually infantile) of the impasse (breakdown) will be imagined together. We will discuss : modes of intervention, particularly their flexibility and their limits ; the difference it makes whether the adolescent brings material to the session or not ; the process in play in the analyst’s constructions (in this case sublimation, which is opposed to the control exercised by the ideal) ; the implicit risk of deconstruction in any imaginary suggestion made by the analyst.