Archives par mot-clé : Traumatic latency

Laurent Tigrane Tovmassian : Sexual Aggression and Pubertal Transformation, Potentializing Traumatic Intrusion?

This paper concerns clinical work with sexual aggression experienced in adolescence, in the fright and bewilderment after the violation. We first revisit the issue of the revival specific to post-traumatic repetition of trauma, hypothesizing the existence of a traumatic latency period when the prevailing traumatic process would suspend the subject’s work of readjustment, bonding, and symbolization. Can such aggressions and their fixed yet active psychic aftermath, characterized by the return of the identical, be joined with registers of fantasy proper to adolescence and to the transformation of the body in puberty? Or are we dealing with two internal foreign bodies, opening on their own and attacking the subject when the latter is caught between a rock and a hard place?

Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 77-86.