The author offers a theoretical and clinical reflection about homosexuality in young adults, using the psychotherapy of a twenty-year-old woman to investigate the outcomes of homosexual transference and its lateralization in terms of object choice and identification. Between the feminine Oedipus complex and the elaboration of the mourning for lost childhood, narcissistic and sexual issues of masochism and melancholy unfurl within a process marked by the violence of the drives and its aftermath.
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.
the psychoanalytic treatment of adolescent girls and of young women suffering from severe food disorders, e. g. specifically bulimic behaviours enables one to point out quite a few problematics whose singularity calls forth metapsychological elaboration : the articulation of both masochism and narcissism enables one to stress the predominance of a moral masochism underlying a severe guilt associated to a specific building of seduction fantasies. Indeed, the subject herein holds an active role, which confirms the strong belief of having seducted the father. Such a “ crime ” compels any recourse to self-punishing behaviours throug an attack on the body within a move which sounds highly melancholic.
Adolescence is a time of great vulnerability for identity because of internal turmoil caused by the eruption of puberty and real consequences for his psychic economy. This identity is inconceivable without a meeting must for any teenager with the question of death and its outcome. The author attempts to examine how a modern society mélancoliforme, the teenager, suffering from Baudelaire’s spleen, is testing its ability to survive the experience of confrontation with death that depends on its becoming psychic adult.
The love state that all of a sudden takes place in the course of some psychoanalytic cures at adolescence, particularly when severe food disorders are experienced, is a psychical event evidencing a narcissistic and libidinal rehandling of the object. It is the sign of a disentangling of an underlying melancholic position that should be assessed in such a way as to find out its psychical goals and transference implications. As the consequence of some kind of mourning from the primary object, it carries with it the hope that a new object may find its place within the ego.
In this interview, responding to questions asked by François Richard, André Green revisits his classic works on temporality (La diachronie en psychanalyse, Le temps éclaté). He places them within the intellectual and psychoanalytical context of the period, clarifying his positions on the relations between structure and development, and his conception of the Ego-Subject. This leads him to go further into his conceptions of the relations between borderline cases and psychosis, starting with Freud’s propositions about melancholy, and by the same token, to discuss the technique and the ethics of clinical treatments.
The question of relations between psychoanalysis and temporality makes adolescence exemplary of a psychotic potential whose specificity André Green seeks to theorize, taking into account its social and cultural dimension.
In this article, the author shows how the concept of subjectivation grew out of clinical work on psychotic states in adolescence. These are related to a melancholic core that is sometimes difficult to discern beneath the drive conflicts of puberty. Using a clinical case of adolescent-onset psychosis, the problem of the fundamental relation between psychosis, temporality and melancholy is restated in a way that can account for “ borderline ”-looking symptomotologies, within a post-Freudian theoretical framework and with reference to certain contributions of Green and Racamier.
The traumatic death of a member of her family seems to have thrown Sylvie, a teenage girl cared for in a day hospital, into an exclusive concern for the dead. However, this lack of separation from the dead is not the sign of a mourning process in progress, nor of a melancholic bond with an object already lost. It bears witness to a cryptic inclusion of a traumatic loss unelaborated by the former generation. This inclusion generates an incestual bond in the family, which Sylvie tries to process through her obsessive questionings about the dead.
The author observes that in Freud’s work the Oedipus complex is omnipresent but rarely theorized as such; she asks whether the Oedipus complex is characteristic of neuroses or if it also occurs in narcissistic and borderline functioning. The case history of an adolescent girl shows that dependence and prevalence of the narcissistic relationship with the mother may mask a paradoxical but strong relationship with the father. Returning to Freud’s writings (Three Essays, The Ego and the Id), Chabert seeks connections between the Oedipus complex and objectal loss-anxiety, and even more, a consubtantiality of loss and the sexual, which is the central idea of Mourning and Melancholy.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 65-79.
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