This article presents the treatment in psychoanalytic psychoboxing of a violent adolescent placed in an Educational Detention Center. These sessions enabled us to posit the existence of cold violence not coming from an aggressive sexualization but from a formidable offensive turning-around in response to feelings of the expressive body’s petrification. The article examines the specific counter-transference logic that these cold furies generate in the clinician, as well as some possible treatment solutions.
This article focuses on the temporal processes at work in the therapy of an adolescent girl. The author will describe the transference movement through its subjective temporalities in the girl and in the therapist, developing this process in three phases of the patient’s subjectivation. Sensory, emotional and acted-out experiences within the counter-transference will be touchpoints for the understanding and historicizing of the therapeutic process by the unconscious.
In the adolescent, an absence or porosity of links with infantile objects causes a crack in the potential for identification and plunges him/her into an unbearable and unsettling feeling that the Ego is uncanny. The psychotherapeutic setting enables the patient to express his hatred towards the mother or the father, within a transference onto the psychoanalyst that makes it possible to encounter another, identified as “stranger,” who is sufficiently different (sexually) and differentiated (narcissistically).
This article will analyze the notion of subjectivation according to R. Cahn (2016) using the example of psychoanalytical practice in a Center for Adolescents that he created (CEREP). The notion of borderline state is redefined with reference to adolescence by the incapacity to gain access to the position of subject of one’s own psychical experience in terms of being. From this is derived a renewed conception of psychoanalytical practice which is specified, justified and distinguished from some contemporary derivatives.
The author shows how, in counter-transference experiences of precession, or gradual re-orientation, the wounded body of the analyst can let itself be invested as a place for representation of the transposition of the patient’s unconscious fantasies of castration. This gradual shifting of the axis of the countertransference should be understood as a valuable tool for the meta-psychological of unconscious process, even before the first analytical encounter.
In the current way of receiving adolescents and their parents at the Maison des Adolescents of Yvelines Sud, the biggest pitfall for the therapeutic staff is the risk of collusion with certain defense mechanisms of the youngsters and/or their families. Such collusions can hamper the work of narration and co-construction during encounters, starting with the representations of the adolescents, of their entourage, their difficulties finding their way and the resources available to them in their territory.
»Attempting to build relationships within « families with broken bonds « requires the therapist to maintain flexibility in the counter-transference despite all opposition, in order to avoid the traps of repetition. Amidst the confusion of projections, counter-transference guarantees the therapist the stability of his identity, in spite of the variations, sometimes brutal, to which he is exposed. By giving meaning to what he feels, he avoids acting out, which would exclude him, and evaluates the reality of immediate danger. Thus avoiding an emergency intervention, he allows a transformation to begin.»
An episode in the life of S. Freud, i.e. the engagement of his daughter Sophie with Max exmplify how counter-transference affects about identity come in contact with the working through surging in the adult when their children discover and show off a liable genital sexuality, thus experiencing love feelings and emotions.
The defence strategies of the Aids pathologies towards finitude strongly recall those building themselves up during adolescence. An ego wounded and attacked by the unbinding forces and infantile ideals trying to disentangle themselves rest in the latter. The resurgence of the fantasy of immortality coming up again and unfolding itself during puberty enables the wiping out or the misappreciation of the wound. Through some extracts from the psychoanalytic cure of a patient suffering from Aids, we shall try to show how such a fantasy is liable to emerge and also how far the psychoanalyst, with reference to the idea of a forecast death may find himself blotted out from his position of neutrality and confronted to his own belief in immortality.
The author studies the nature of the therapist’s engagement, more precisely his counter-transference when faced with the treatment of trauma. The example of Agathe is presented; her treatment takes place in the particularly tragic atmosphere of Rwanda.
Revue trimestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines