THE ISSUE OF ADOLESCENCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: THEORY, TECHNIQUES AND ETHICS OF PRACTICAL WORK

Abstract

The article presents the key psychoanalytic ideas regarding structural transformations, unconscious processes, and relationships with the object that characterize adolescence. The logic of adolescence is described as a series of sequences: from infantile psychosexuality to mature one, from reactivation of the Primary Oedipal complex to the resolution of the Secondary, from Imaginary castration to the Symbolic one, from the “castrated” gender to the female, from the Oedipal Super-Ego to the Cultural Super-Ego, from the incestuous object to extra-family object choices, from the Name of the Father to a symbolic set of identification objects. It is shown how acting out and choosing the “impossible object” – thing, alcohol, virtual content, or “nothing” – are adolescents’ attempts to cope with puberty challenges. The authors also provide an overview of recommendations regarding the technique of working with adolescents and suggest basing the stated technical aspects on the grounds of psychoanalytic ethics. The work formulated 5 points that combine ethics and technical goals in psychoanalytic work with adolescents: 1) to formulate and to follow first of all the request of the adolescent himself or herself; 2) to stay in the ethical position that knowledge is on the subject’s side, avoiding “teaching” or “treating” adolescent’s opinions, feelings, attitudes; 3) to maintain the subjectivity of the adolescent in relation to his or her suffering, history and desire; 4) to respect the adolescent’s symptom as an attempt to invent something that could resolve an existing internal conflict or respond to anxiety; 5) to support the adolescent in his or her work of grief over a number of losses – the phallic father, infantile ideas about the feminine, the Oedipus promise, his or her past body and child’s place in the Primary Oedipal situation.