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Irina Adomnicai has been working at the Centre Psychosomatique Adultes et Enfants (IPSO) in Paris for many years and this book has emerged
directly from her clinical experience there. Its constant interweaving of clinical practice and theory, each drawing on the other in turn, deserves special mention. This book also won its author the P. Male prize.
Before turning to the text, it is worth considering Cathérine Chabert's preface, which indicates some research in relation to severe somatic illnesses in adolescents that was conducted from “psychoanalytic perspectives both in theoretical, metapsychological terms and in clinical, therapeutic terms” (p. 7). Highlighting the rigour of a method with a consistent epistemological foundation, Adomnicai emphasizes the permanent dialectic between the psychic treatment and its requirements and the attention accorded to the somatic problem. This also highlights the idea of somatic illness as a counter-cathexis of the sexual impulses in an upheaval of infantile dynamics. This impulse is often accompanied by a difficulty in the separation/individuation process.
Adomnicai's hypothesis consists in the idea that somatic illnesses are illnesses of the ego, which enables her to consider adolescent somatizations as a counter-cathexis of the sexual impulses involved in the mobilization imposed by the adolescent process on the psyche. She regards taking account of the ailing body as a current theoretico-clinical necessity and she immediately draws us into her project, presenting an adolescent problematic that fails through the unexpected onset of a somatic illness. In other words, Adomnicai invites us into:
The psychic clinical treatment of the somatic symptom in adolescence through a hypothesis of somatic illness as a de-signified signifier, somatic illness as a screen illness in relation to sexuality and, finally, the anti-nostalgic quality devolved to somatic illness by adolescents' familial and individual ps