I will discuss the treatment of two adolescents presenting a heightened oedipal crisis linked to early disturbances in the relation with the primal object, and for whom the use of pornographic representations and practices is a defense against the traumatic threat of incestuous attraction to the mother and against the genital relation, which brings issues of the relation with another person. This regressive, defensive sexuality touches many adolescents to different degrees at the onset of the crisis of adolescence.
This article focuses on an unusually exacerbated interplay of transference seduction in a teenage girl who is intensely sexually excited and who pursues unrequited loves following her father’s sudden death. The analyst’s response to this excitation and to the patient’s imperious demand for love will create a scenario wherein the seduction fantasy can be differentiating and organizing, alongside the fantasy of the father’s murder.
Using two clinical vignettes (one from an institutional therapeutic treatment, and the other from an individual treatment), the author investigates issues underlying the apparently “liberated” sexuality of two older adolescents: a tight, reciprocal clinging to the mother, in the absence of internalization of parental imagos that would enable true individuation. He calls attention to the psychopathological and therapeutic consequences of this.
This article will examine the ways that adolescents use the psychic back-and-forth between masculinity and femininity to develop a deformed Oedipus complex. Bisexuality, especially in adolescence, includes a harmful regressive tendency towards a lack of differentiation. This can be usefully deployed within a therapeutic treatment.
The authors introduce different angles for thinking about adolescent sexualities. Have changes in society – social media, the recognition of minority sexualities – changed the representations and behaviors of adolescents? Treatments, institutional care, and cultural objects, viewed through the prism of a study of transference, offer valuable ground for reflecting on the complex relations between sexuality, violence and identity issues.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 1, 9-12.
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