Suicidal Gesture in Adolescence: Melancholic Identification

Extract

[...] The Ego merges more or less unconsciously with this object, which it cannot resolve to accept the loss."4 The subject is haunted by the death of the object or rather the dead object, but also by guilt. Would the adolescent try to end his life to end his guilt? To disinvest himself from it? According to Robert Mancini, "the path of the drive passes through the other - reference to Lacan - with this precision that it is, from the point of view of A. Green, another similar one"" and in the case of a deceased mother the term of "similar" takes on all its importance. [...]

[...] Oedipal guilt and masochistic guilt then mix in the adolescent process. In the case of moral masochism linked to the figure of the "dead mother" symbolic or real, and therefore during a sudden disinvestment linked to depression or the mother's death, the adolescent must, in addition to the remaking of his representations related to the adolescent process, generate a work of association between his affects and his representations. A work all the more difficult in the case of a mother who died by suicide." Loss of the object, loss of the self, and a mode of being that works against the self, the process of the bereaved adolescent becomes more complex as the melancholic identificatory problem is added to a mechanism of moral masochism. [...]

[...] The adolescent is then caught in a conflict of narcissistic identifications that exceed him since he is unconscious. The introduction of the dead object into the ego by identification determines a disintrication of the pulsion, where the investment of the death drive attaches to the superego and the libido towards the ego in a polarization of the pulsional investments. Identification is a psychic movement at the base of the process of subjectivation but when it is of a melancholic order it seems that the reintrication of the pulsion requires a passage from auto-sadism to masochism according to Chabert so that suicide does not become the ultimate solution to an unbearable guilt. [...]

[...] Suicidal gesture in adolescence, Identification as an indicator - Nathalie de Kernier (2011) - How can the internalized object not succumb to the deadly melancholic forces ? Adolescence conceived more as a process than as a crisis is a period of life or rather a passage from childhood to adult life. When the future adult is bereaved, it sometimes happens that psychological mechanisms are put in place, and these differ from the 'normal' adolescent process, that is, they will be different from a process experienced without the death of the parent. [...]

[...] She is like divided into two, one part accusing the other who feels guilty. An example of moral masochism as a turning against oneself when disentanglement becomes so important that a separation-division of the self occurs. The text also studies the links between moral masochism and melancholic identification. However, let us specify before presenting them that melancholic identification is found in several types of psychological functioning and is therefore not a purely psychotic mechanism. *The entire text is available upon request from the customer service. [...]