Contenu du sommaire : Séparations

The clinical situation here presented reveals that a child seen in psychological counselling sometimes shows symptoms which aren't really its own. Some ‘attachment disorders' should rather be viewed in a trans-generational perspective. For instance, the separation anxiety disorder displayed by Ambre (6) seems to be an echo of the abandonment of her mother in the first months of her life. The creation of an intermediary space (drawing and ‘living sculpture') permits the access to unconscious and unrepresentable part of her mother's trauma history. It is therefore important to create a therapeutic space which includes the parent(s) who is/are assumed to be active in the creation of the child's symptoms. The purpose of this space will be to contain the traumatic remnants, which can thus be worked on and thought about.

Basing themselves on a case history of a thirteen years old teenager, having accomplished a suicidal gesture, the authors try to clarify the links between adolescence's process and separation anguish and try to understand the sense of a self-destruction act. Is the reversal of aggressiveness against oneself a result of an extreme intensification of separation anguish during the adolescence? Following Julie's words, the separation with the parental objects seems in the same time researched and feared. This ambivalence could generate an internal excitation which disorganize the psychic functioning. However, we can observe that the perturbed mechanisms of identifications could reach a new balance after one year: the narcissistic defenses appear stronger and the aggressive and libidinal movements become more moderate and equilibrate.

The impact of a separation upon the children is all the greater when the parents continue to tear themselves apart, keeping up conflicts without being able to really separate. The brotherhood may then divide in order the respect the ontique loyalty towards both parents, brothers and sisters then become strangers to one another, rivals and sometimes ennemies. This article tries to lay theoretical and clinical tracks in order to light up this issue in a contextual way.

The authors, clinical psychologists and child psychiatrists in a medico-psychological consultation for children and teenagers, have for several years been faced with requests for consultation linked to the issue of the separation of the parental couple and the possible effects in the child's clinical method : are there specific clinical symptoms or disorders due to the separation of parents ?Through statistical analysis, the authors reveal that one out of every two children seen in consultation has experienced the separation of his parents. Among them, 80 percent experienced their parents' separation before first grade, which has repercussions on the psychical life of the child as well as on his ability to learn. Then, while examining the clinical content of their consultations, the authors form the hypothesis that parental separation can affect the child's views on their parents' sexuality, a question which can have traumatic effects, especially on young children. The representation of their origins becomes uncertain, and precisely the one of the union of their mother and father. The mother may then establish a very close relationship of « incestuous » nature with her child, and the father may become a maternal substitute. The child then only evolves in a « maternal »environment, whoever he lives with his mother or his father, and consequently the third role disappears. A new clinical practice will then be seen in the child : symptoms of instability and of acting out, of a lack of attention, some inability to learn, a sense of insecurity and of ephemera.

During old age, every body and every couple live many losses and separation.
The late separations in a couple reveal the unconscious stake in this one. The separation is exploreted in three angle : the request of a therapy of couple, the placing in an institution of the man or the wife, the psychic works in the end of the life.

At the end of the existence of a person, the proposal for a clinical encounter may give rise to unique psychological constructions. Around the sense and non-sense of what is happening to the subject, these developments are attempting to shape the confusion of desire and the end of life. What status conferred on these psychic formations related to the end of life and what may be their function ? How positioning them in relation to known processes of “the stages of dying” and “work of the death” ?My clinician psychologist practice from people who are hospitalizing until their death is the place from where I want to interrogate the separation process for an ill person. How does what is happening in this final moment allow it to enlighten the profound nature of the separation ?

The author proposes a reflexion on the question of the impossible separation and the blossoming of the psychosis like one of his psychopathological consequences. In echo, shame as forms narcissistic expression would come to be placed in the interval. But shame is not only one singular problems, it would also appear like “ethical urgency”. References freudiennes will give on the one hand elements to think the metapsychology of shame, its instinctual origins and its bonds with the destructiveness and the death instinct. In addition, the expression of shame like ontological test in comparison with the Other in its version lacanienne, will support the assumption of shame like attempt to test itself prone vis-a-vis to the decompensation psychotic and its purposes as well of desubjectivation as of dehumanization. This reflexion insists, through a clinical evocation, on this co-occurence between psychosis, separation, shame and social bond.

As an introduction, the author analyzes the relationship between love and desire : a separation from the idealized image of oneself is necessary in order to set up the desire, although it is not, obviously, a definitive separation : for any subject, the narcissistic relationship of the desire remains. In « normal » mourning, according to Freud, the idealized image of oneself is shaken, because of the loss of the object of love which supported it. In melancholy, the particular type of identification —a real incorporation— stops the subject from taking distance from him/her. The difficulty of any separation in melancholy does not depend on a specular problem, but on the falling of the imaginary veil which surrounds the object of henceforth lost love, the object with which the subject becomes identified, tragically, not as an ideal but as litter, rubbish, nothing.

It is often considered that the compulsive consumption of a drug aims at obtaining a pleasure without limits, echo of an infinite pleasure called by Lacan jouissance of One or “One-jouissance”. This pleasure is supposed to exist in the early childhood before the humanizing fundamental Laws have been transmitted to the subject. Based on a large clinical experience of one of the authors and on eight deeper interviews of research, the authors explain that this research of the One-jouissance is produced simultaneously with the attempt, often ignored, to separate from this same jouissance and as well from the incestuous relationship with the Thing (in freudian terms) with the parental Other (in lacanian terms). They also explain that a drug, the pharmakon of the Greeks, must be considered in its double value: a poison as much as a solution to a malaise.

This article proposes to show the contribution of projective methods and particularly of the T.A.
T. in understanding the different types of anxieties known as separation anxieties in children who present violent behavior and are placed in therapeutic care centers. Several types of anxiety are described in detail and all are related to elaboration difficulties in the problem configuration of object loss.