The parental couple has difficulty handling this second pregnancy, which comes too soon after the first. Clementine is born thirteen months after her older sister Floriane, a restless baby who worries her mother a lot. The couple live with their two daughters in the family property, which belonged to the mother’ s parents, in the same village as the father’ s parents. Her father is a self- employed farmer and her mother helps him out at the farm. The structure of the care unit allows Clementine to have daily contact with other young people during freer times, like meals, or in more formal settings, such as therapeutic activity groups.Ĭlementine is a young girl brought up in a rural area. The second element is long-term therapeutic follow-up with a psychologist, together with an observation process by a clinical psychologist/researcher, within the framework of research work on anorexia nervosa.Īs is the case for all adolescents, the young girl also attends the patients/nursing staff group, which meets weekly and is made up of different members of the nursing staff (child psychiatrists, interns, psychologists, nurses, nursing auxiliaries, etc.) as well as all the adolescents in the unit. Monthly family interviews are also proposed. First, there is medical and therapeutic follow-up with a child psychiatrist, for which Clementine attends individual interviews each week. When she arrives there, the therapeutic framework comprises two elements. Given the extent of her undernutrition, she has not yet entered puberty when admitted to the care unit. Upon her admission, she presents signs of psychical distress and her body is in an alarming state, with a BMI of 12.5. Meeting clementine and presentation of the therapeutical environmentĬlementine is a young girl who has just turned thirteen when she is admitted to a child psychiatry unit for “anorexia nervosa with melancholy”. We open the debate on the question of the benefits of separation from the family and of hospitalization, as well as on the potential impact of the therapeutic framework on the symptom. We think of the anorexic symptom more as a way of setting up the subjectivation process than as a self-destructive behavior, which enables us to address the specific features of a possible therapeutic approach. We present the changes in the psychological dynamics and discourse of the young girl during psychological interviews, but also in the wider framework of hospitalization (medical follow-up, family interviews, relationships to the peer group and to the healthcare team, etc.). A psychoanalytical approach sheds light on several topics: anorexia nervosa, melancholy, twinning, puberty and subjective elaboration. We propose a qualitative method for the analysis of the individual interviews conducted with this young patient in a patient/psychologist/researcher configuration. We posit that, in the case of Clementine, the choice of the anorexic symptom may demonstrate both a necessity to detach herself from love objects and a difficulty in doing so, but also provides the start of a subjectifying solution. Our starting point is the therapeutic follow-up of Clementine, a melancholic adolescent, thrown into an institutional setting following a severe case of anorexia nervosa. This article considers the question of the subjective elaboration of a subject’s relationship to the family-other within a hospitalization facility.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |