Drawing from clinical work with adolescents in a home for troubled children (MECS), which confronts us with the absence of a treatment demand as well as with the kind of bonding that is prone to narcissistic seduction, incestuality, and omnipotence, we investigate the kinds of framework that could enable us to engage a therapeutic process. To this end, we present a definition of the “triple echo” setting and illustrate its potential effects and tools by means of the situation of a fifteen-year-old adolescent boy
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.
Using an account of the mother of a parricidal adolescent, we offer several hypotheses about the most salient aspects of unconscious motives for murder. The parent-child link that has been tainted by incestuality is a source of indifferentiation and confusion of oneself with objects, giving rise to a feeling of melanchogenic impersonalization, a source of violence. In this context, murder also appears as an attempt to “make an origin” within a troubled transgenerational context.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 355-365.
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