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.
Using excerpts from a treatment carried out during the pandemic, the author explores the connections between the inner attack of the drive and the external attack of collective events shared by the patient and the therapist. These recent collective events may echo some adolescent processes marked by the “internal saboteur” and by repetition compulsion. A transitional space is established where the psychic functioning appears as a third party that can be discussed by the two participants for as long as is necessary.
After reviewing the different axes of filiation according to J. Guyotat, with which the narrative axis may be associated (B. Golse, M. R. Moro), and relocating the issue of psychical bisexuality with regard to the precursors of sexual differentiation, this article will offer some reflections and clinical illustrations of adolescents’ aggression as it relates to identity and narrative filiation on the one hand, and the psychical bisexuality of adoptive parents on the other.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 705-716.
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