The specific nature of work with adolescents requires an adjustment of the classical analytical setting. Using cases of difficult adolescents in contexts of breakdown or arrested development, the author discusses and illustrates the notion of adjustments to the setting. She investigates the place of interpretation, its specific character in the treatment of adolescents, and the value of combining interpretive with other tools in order that the individual may be able to historicize his or her traumatic experiences.
This article will try to answer two questions : who is « the hero » ? And what is the relationship between the heroic and adolescence ? In order to find heroes in their original essence, the author turns to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and notices some fundamental characteristics which show that, deep down, the mission of the hero and the mission of the adolescent are one in the same. The two poems organized around narrative dimensions of siege and voyage represent rather well the lines followed by the adolescent experience. The paper turns on four interlinking themes in two dialectical pairs : Prehistory and History, the One and the Double, The Circle and the Ellipse, Life and Death.
From this perspective, the myth of the hero may be seen as the means by which it is possible to attempt a secular confrontation with death, a confrontation which paradoxically represents one of the cardinal points of the adolescent process. Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 345-366.
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