Dépôt d’une création adolescente dans le cadre analytique : du réel au symptôme

Abstract

Lucy, 19 years old, underwent several years of psychoanalytical psychotherapy (face-to-face) to help her get over the panic attacks she suffered since the beginning of her puberty by working through a family secret related to the death of her unborn twin. Her panic attacks had been replaced by a much less disabling symptoms i.e. neurotic phobia. Such progress was possible thanks to the revision of her oedipal complex. Simultaneously, at the middle of her therapy, Lucy gave to her analyst two notebooks containing a set of diary entries she began to write prior to and during her analysis. Often, adolescent recourse to therapeutic mediators during analysis to facilitate his/her interaction with the therapist as well as to remodel his/her needs of both bonding and independency. Mediators, such as writings, that the patient creates outside the analytical setting and then give to the analyst has a therapeutic function since it helps the patient to work through what speech fails to express. Those mediators are not to be mistaken with acting-out. What is actually surprising in the case of Lucy is the fact that not only she did not seek a feedback from the analyst as to the contents of her notebooks but rather insisted at the last session that her analyst keeps it. Lucy's demand goes beyond a request of love addressed in the transference to the analyst. In fact, in her transference Lucy assigned to her analyst the role of both a witness and a “crypt keeper”. Her confidential writings became a phobic objects as in Pandora box (containing the remains of her once upon a time madness) that she chooses to avoid looking at. Lucy left those remains of the “tormented” part of her soul in the safety of her analyst's hands as a “safety deposit” that she no longer needed. At the meantime, her choice proved nonetheless that her “deposit” (representing internal objects) is no longer a threat either to herself or to the analyst. To conclude, we could say that Lucy's rather successful psychotherapy helped her to overcome her panic attacks once she was able to reshape her relations with the internal objects without destroying them.