Working through centred on the body in the analysis of a psychotic adolescent.

Through a few clinical sessions, the author demonstrates the complexity of psychoanalytic work with difficult adolescents, while also indicating its benefits when this approach is enhanced by working on the body-mind connection. The author shows how she establishes contact with a difficult adolescent patient who is experiencing immense fear and intense hatred of her body and how this patient then communicates through her body intense anxieties relating to body-mind dissociation. The bodily transference is central to this work. Inspired by the works of Bion, Ferrari and Lombardi, among others, the author shows the emergence of the bodily ego through the clinical sessions and the arduous journey of helping a teenager to encounter her own body and her own identity. Bodily experiences, dreams, nightmares and quasi-delusional thoughts must be able to be received without discrimination and contained while thinking about them and articulating them in order to help the patient to encounter herself, with thought but also with a body.