Starting with the ambivalent way the delinquent minor is regarded, this article will show how at different times one favors either prevention and education or – because the delinquent is perceived more as a danger to society – exclusion and confinement.
A story that is continually being played out around the issue of « open » or « closed » institutions.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Enfermement – 2005 T.23 n°4
Philippe Duverger, Jean Malka, Benjamin Petrovic : psychological locking-up in adolescents
This article deals with the various mechanisms leading adolescents to psychological locking-up. Locking-up is different from isolation, inasmuch as it implies a disavowal of the other’s mirroring ability. Because of the conflict between narcissism and object relation and because of the way puberty upsets early dependence on infantile objects, psychological locking-up appears under the guise of a fetishistic relation. The presentation of a few clinical cases will allow us to set down some guidelines enabling adolescents to get free from locking-up, even though, most of the time, these young patients are not asking us for anything.
Bernard Duez: shutting-off and issues of undecidability
After a short ethnological and historical review, the author highlights the work of shutting-off (or retreating) by showing how this shutting-off requires a scene. Starting with a clinical example, emphasizing the scenic dimension and the notion of the internal groups, he shows how at the moment of shutting-off the adolescent falls into an unconscious contract between adolescents and the adult world. It appears that shutting-off refers primarily to problems of intrusion relating to the original insufficiency of the human subject. The work of the internal groups, oscillating between bonding with the other, appropriation of oneself and shutting-off, has the function of transforming the traumatic state, which the author defines as an ambiguous subjective state that confronts the subject with undecidability, with the impossibility of directing his drives. The invention of the bond of incompatibility is an attempt to emerge from this state and set in motion the work of the internal groups.