Acting, dreaming, thinking in adolescence: An analysis from the beginning to the end

This article presents the evolution of a face-to-face analysis of a severely disturbed 16-year-old girl. In the first part of the analysis, communication was mainly at a nonverbal level, via gestures, body movements, gaze, long silences and the coded language of dreams without associations. The importance of listening is stressed, including a “hearing with eyes,” in order to attune to presymbolic levels of the patient's psychic organization and to gather preverbal elements of her subjective expression. The analytic device is considered as a transformation system through which unconscious somatopsychic processes – sensorial, emotional and protomental states – acquire the quality of representability. In the final phase of the analysis, thanks to her acquired capacity to narrate, relive and work through what had been enacted in the relationship and what had been discarded, repeated and transformed in dreams, the patient succeeded in revealing and signifying her internal experience in the context of the transference. The author is confident that the introjection of the analytic experience and the elaboration of the separation from the analyst will further modify, in the post-analysis, the traumatic memory of the death of the patient's mother, which is repeated in the transference at the end of the analysis.