Last year, my Master’s thesis project was dedicated to teenage mothers. I did my internship at a maternal center in Nantes that aims to help teenage mothers and their children under the age of three. Founded in 1846, this establishment became an educational center for pregnant girls or young girls with children in 1971. Nowadays, a multidisciplinary team provides material, educational and psychological support to young mothers and their children. The clinical material analyzed in my Master’s thesis comes from the follow-up of a young resident of the centre whom I chose to name « Miss Lightning ». It was enriched by my observations at the weekly mother-child workshop « History of Playing », as well as by the in-depth study of Miss Lightning’s social file. Formal and informal exchanges with other professionals in charge of the situation also contributed to enriching my collection of clinical data.
Throughout my literature review that traces the work of various authors who studied the phenomenon of early motherhood, I suggest to question the meaning of desire for pregnancy during adolescence with regards to the specific psychic rearrangements of this period of life. It seems that a link appears between the reactivation of the Oedipus complex and the occurrence of maternity in adolescence. My clinical research brought me to propose two hypotheses:
H1 : The occurrence of an early pregnancy, understood in the sense of an “acting out breakthrough”, could be the expression of a difficult or impossible psychic work of elaboration, integration and liquidation of a complex oedipal problem reactivated by the process of adolescence.
H2 : Knowing the identity-seeking quest of adolescence and the inevitable identificatory movements faced by the teenager who becomes a mother, early pregnancy could be understood as a call to the original mother, to this first aid in the mother-child dyadic relationship, in an attempt to repair a maternal imago too desidealized because of significant deficiencies in maternal care.
My objective was to formulate hypotheses concerning the psychic processes at work in the desire for teenage pregnancy in order to allow the professionals who accompany these young mothers to better understand the issues underlying this maternity.
My analysis of the clinical data collected with regards to the proposed problem supports the hypotheses emitted in this study and research work. Indeed, many clinical elements have revealed the complexity of the oedipal problematic in Miss Lightning’s underpinned by an incestual family climate, « anti-oedipal » according to the definition of Racamier (2010). Furthermore, the bond between Miss Lightning and her mother appears to be particularly painful and degraded. Miss Lightning seems to have a very negative representation of the female population.
So finally, I concluded my research work with two other questions answering the previous ones :
Q 1 : Could early pregnancy be a clinical indicator of these incestual family situations where there is a confusion of places and generations ?
Q 2 : Is it possible that in the search for their identity as women, these teenage girls seek through their motherhood to reconstruct psychic less negative representations of woman and of the mother ?
