Forensic clinical investigation frequently reveals the absence of shame in perpetrators of sexual violence while simultaneously victims seem overwhelmed by shame. We sought to understand this paradox by analyzing the dynamics of the introjection of shame in victims’ identification with the aggressor and of the injection of shame in the aggressor's projective identification with his victim.
We focused on the case of Louis, a dismissed priest, sentenced for pedocriminal behavior. This case is part of a qualitative research project conducted on a population of 14 inmates of a Parisian prison and based on interviews structured around the individual's life story and analyzed with the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology.
We observe that behind Louis's apparent absence of shame, as with many of our research subjects guilty of sexual violence, there is, in fact, a great deal of unconscious shame, first introjected by the victim in the abuse suffered, and later injected in the victim in the abuse committed as a means to unload an unbearable shame.
The introjection of the shame of the aggressor by his victim in the dynamic of Ferenczi's identification with the aggressor appears as a complement to the injection of shame by the aggressor into his victim through the dynamic of projective identification: both an ordinary projective identification in the form of a projective reversal of shame, and an operative projective identification in the form of perverse behaviors.
The communicating vessels of shame among perpetrators and victims of sexual violence, between injection and introjection, help us better understand the contagious characteristics of shame in the etiology of sexual violence.
This study presents a reflection on the inhabitation of a place and the constitution of a territorial Self,’ in the context of ‘country’ life and work. The hypothesis is then put forward of a possible ‘psychopathology of (de-)territorialization,’ according to which a ‘non-place,’ generator of meaninglessness, may be involved in a suicidal dynamics specifically linked to the territorial dimension of the Self and the impossible inhabitation of a place.
The clinical and psychopathological aspects are examined from the perspective of the link between certain ‘traditional farmers’ and the place where they live, with regard to the reciprocal imprint between psyche and territory.
This exploratory study will provide guidance for clinical research into the suffering of farmers who fall outside the scope of commonly identified ‘psycho-social disorders.’
The limitations and impasses induced by dissociative or melancholic processes are related either to a failure of Presence, compromising the construction of a habitable world, i.e. one that can be territorialized, or to the hostility of a world that is resistant to the dynamics of a territorialization process, and therefore unfit to allow us to dwell in it.
These considerations open up an original perspective for qualitative research aimed at understanding the relationships between alteration of the territorial foundations of the Self and suicidal intentionality.
This article aims to bypass the epistemological impasses produced by the contemporary development of the concept of disability – a concept formed in close relation with the societal context and with questions of human rights, more than with a nosographic and clinical problematic - and more precisely with regard to mental disability, a clinical entity whose classification history is particularly difficult, and yet at the heart of the edification of psychiatry since the 19th century. In studying this trajectory, we aim to demonstrate the interest of psychoanalysis's theoretical-clinical approach.
We analyze the evolution of psychiatric and psychoanalytical conceptions of mental disability. We discuss them and identify avenues of reflection for the psychoanalytically oriented clinical and therapeutic work we do with young disabled patients and their parents.
Mental disability is placed in the historical dynamic of the attempts to classify it: idiotism, idiocy, mental debility, mental or intellectual disability, etc. Its proven or strongly assumed organic etiology originally marginalized, and continues to marginalize, certain modes of clinical thinking and psychic treatments, of which the psychoanalytical approach is one.
We discuss and differentiate between the concepts of “mental” and “psychic” and the ambiguity of their meanings. The “mentally handicapped” subject, when reduced to their neuronal aetiology, is considered from a deficit perspective, which relegates the investigation of psychic life to the background or even renders it superfluous. Following in the footsteps of D. Widlöcher, we point out that Kraepelin's thinking, which made the therapeutic indication dependent on the supposed aetiology, is now outdated. We therefore emphasize the individual differences in the relationship that develops between the young disabled person and his or her family, and in the interaction between their psyches. The effects of the birth of a disabled child on the construction of the feeling of parenthood, the bond of filiation, and parental narcissism are thus understood within the dynamics of interactions, both real and fantasized, which necessarily differ according to the subjects, parents and children. More specifically, we consider J. Laplanche's “fundamental anthropological situation” as a heuristic model for thinking about the psychic life of the child with a disability and the infantile sexuality that constitutes it, in adult-child interaction, as in everyone else. We hypothesize that the parental encounter with a child presenting a handicapping pathology is likely to send some parents back to their own “uncanniness,” that is to say, to the disturbing return of a repressed or primitive way of thinking abandoned a long time ago, coming from their own “internal foreign land.” This internal irruption is likely to lead t