You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The panel began with some words of the chair, Virginia Ungar, introducing the subject, the presenters and a brief summary of their ideas. She pointed out that it is important to have in mind that the passage from puberty to adolescence and from there to adult life implies very complex processes. These demand ‘psychic work’ from a mind that is indeed in a chaotic situation: at puberty the latency structure collapses and drives that come from a body that has become a ‘stranger’ burst in. This situation will imply a complex task of integration for the psyche. Nowadays it is not possible to approach the adolescent phenomenon only from the point of view of their inner world, or from the impact their body has on their mental organization: adolescence ties together the body, the psyche and the social. The time when psychoanalysis could infer meanings from a single standpoint, either the internal world or the environment, is long gone. The patient and the therapist are social creatures and both are influenced by the environment in which they live. Therefore, although the adolescent process has certain invariants, the transit from puberty to adolescence and from there to adult life will change according to the different social environments in which the individual will carry on the developmental process.
In her presentation, Irene Ruggiero states that an adolescent, who is not able to use his own psyche to deal with conflicts, has usually had a childhood with histories of intrusions of the object in their private space and an environment with an inability for symbolic processes. This picture frequently leads to the patient's difficulty in separating and setting personal boundaries. The boundary-forcing modalities used by severely disturbed adolescents and their families inevitably manifest in the therapeutic space too, put to the test by their acting out. In these situations, the analyst is strongly provoked to act and obliged to work on the boundary between the internal and e