Analysis of adolescents: clinical immersions in the realm of elasticity of the technique

Abstract

The article presents a trajectory of discovery of the richness of the Ferenczian ideas: starting from a question of technical management of the “identification with the aggressor” in the clinic with children victims of sexual abuse, the author came across the visionary ideas of Sándor Ferenczi in favor of a flexibility in the analytical technique, in order to overcome the resistance of some patients to the orthodox analytical method. Such a proposal, even though it has not been studied or followed by psychoanalytic institutions, perfectly serves to describe the management of analytic technique with adolescents in the contemporary world – both in renouncing the strict observance of the fundamental rule of free association and in the analyst's necessary availability to live with silence as a way of resistance of the patient, or with their acting out. Ferenczi's stimulus to analysts to pay attention to the strength of client resistance and the feelings mobilized by counter-transference may add to the prescriptions about trust in the frankness and sincerity of the analyst of the patient's suspicious and unfriendly attitudes. As will be ilustrated by fragments of a clinical case, the author’s recommendations fit perfectly in the minefield in which the analytical setting with adolescents is constituted.