The concerns that today’s adolescents have about ecology is investigated in light of contemporary philosophical and sociological thinking about man’s dependence on the environment. Though denied by modern society, this is emphasized by psychoanalysis. It can also be understood at an intra-psychic level through the debt owed to one’s forbears and the guilt that has been handed down. Ecological activism could enable adolescents to reestablish bonds that have been interrupted, as part of a true “return to origins” from them.
The treatment of adolescents calls attention to a dearth of exploration of one’s surrounding and one’s psychic life in some subjects who are inhibited or unable to handle frustration. Recent interest in “stalled” latency phases has led to greater understanding of this period of human psychosexual development, long perceived/conceived as a “silent” one, and to a reimagining of possible ways of restarting the transitional processes associated with the work of latency.
Psychical dependence during adolescence is here approached from two angles: the Ego/other relation and the inside/outside polarity. In this passage from childhood to adulthood, the experience of separation from the object is the central component of the issue of dependence, particularly when it comes to addictions. We will try to show the paradoxical nature of separation process in adolescence, its primary and Oedipal core whose interweaving provides the basis for its impasses.
Dependence is part of the adolescent process as it relates to the reactivation of drives and the changes this entails. Group psychotherapy is also the space where dependence can be reenacted in transferences onto the setting and the therapist. The session, which calls into question the subject’s borders, echoes primary experiences of identification, but the group process will restart conflicts as part of the processes of differentiation and identity construction.
The author considers the opportunity of specific alternate moments of symmetric-asymmetric relationship (which are to be contained in a classic asymmetric frame) to facilitate analytical work, and to allow interpretations with an analysand who is usually afraid of dependence, hostile to the Super-Ego representatives, in need of non-declared containment and of a basic contribution to the Self cohesion, as the adolescent patient is.
The clinical history illustrates this specific way of working, quite different from the one commonly adopted in the analysis of adult patients.
For instance, the analyst must be able to temporarily renounce, sometimes for a long period, too frequent and brilliant interpretations that would underline the adult’s superiority, which is hard for the adolescent to tolerate.
The author highlights the original axes of Kari Hauge’s clinical presentation: which combines an accommodation of the regression of the adolescent girl as in the treatment of a child with an encountering technique based on the specificity of the adolescent dimension – the formulation of interpretations both of unconscious content and of the actual relation between the patient and the analyst. This practice allows for an elaboration of infantile Oedipus complexes re-actualized by adolescence while facilitating a resumption of the process of subjectivation, once the needs of dependence have been acknowledged.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 29-40.
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