Infantile and pubertal sexuality in therapy groups of writing for adolescents

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider, as a field for the analytic encounter, the therapeutic mediation of writing in a group activity for adolescents, in the framework of the psychoanalytic metapsychology. The therapeutic group of writing, which articulates writing as a resource and the group mechanism, leads the adolescent into the road to subjectivization, allowing for the ownership of his/her body, frequently experienced as alien to him/ her, for the mourning of the childhood parental figures and for a process
of self-historization to get underway. The paper is an attempt to envisage forms of a therapeutic setting that is specific for the adolescent situation, and to explore, with the help of a clinical example, the way in which group writing activates both oedipal and archaic orders. This writing, in the context of the group mechanism, makes it possible for the adolescent to deal with the pubertal libidinal aspects from a distance, reactualizing the vicissitudes of his/her early relationships and resorting to the representation
of the archaic body experiences, which refer to the pregenital body. The adolescents’ writing is in this way marked by the logics of infantile sexuality, which organize his/her unconscious, and which at the same time imply the traces of the pubertal drive inflow, which can be symbolized by the therapeutic writing in the group.