Some psychodynamic benchmarks
During the adolescent period, a young person experiences a phase of distance from parental objects. In interacting with his parents, he deals with issues of separation, dependence, and gradually invests new objects that help him to live this transition period from parental dependency to independence.
During the habitual process of separation-individuation, the young person in relation with his parents acquires enough internal security for this process to move forward without too much difficulty. This is the case for the majority of teenagers. Jeammet, P. (2001) discusses the need for “addiction adjustments”. In other words, the young person must find a way to manage the addiction to his parents.
On this path of adolescence, the young will cross drugs or psychoactive substances. Depending on whether he is going through this period of “crisis” in a more or less painful way, he will more or less resort to the consumption of products in an occasional or abusive way. The majority of authors who are interested in addictions – Marcelli, Pédinieli, Jeammet, Vénisse – consider that addictive behaviors take root in this period of movement that constitutes adolescence.
Indeed, the consumption of toxic products in adolescence can be the result of a “simple” experiment, “trials”, Morel, A., Hervé, F., Fontaine, B. (1997). There is certainly a risky behavior but it is moderate. This calculated risk can be structuring and constitutes an experiment. This is the case for the majority of teenagers.
But for other teens, the gradual loss of the parental structural support can be synonymous with emptiness, or a hole. The teenager is not able ─ or in trouble ─ to invest new objects. He will first look for risk more than experience. This is mainly the case of young people who are more in an inappropriate consumption of products.
Marcelli, D. (1994) notes that “the tension between the need for objects on one side, what Blos calls object hunger and narcissistic vulnerability on the other and what Françoise Dolto calls the” complex of lobster “explains why adolescence is a risky period for addiction behaviors”.
Some adolescents are thus in a more problematic behavior, a “behavior symptom” Morel, A., Hervé, F., Fontaine, B. (1997) from an existing vulnerability. For these, the use of psychoactive substances takes another form of “behaviors that reflect the maintenance of dependence and reflect a partial failure of internal psychic processes to develop the relationship.” The use of drugs can fill a void that leaves the young person in a dependence while having the feeling of control of the object.
For lack of mastering the internal objects constituting his identity, the adolescent tries to master external objects (products) while maintaining a relationship of dependence.
Jeammet P. (2001) notes that, with respect to drug addiction, “living relationships give way to relationships of hold … emotions replace the search for sensation”.
He adds that “these behaviors have, at least initially, a value of self-therapy. They protect against anxiety and represent for the subject a compromise by which he finds a relational substitute that protects him from his emotional dependence on others and over which he believes he exercises power … without realizing that by a progressive inversion he becomes the prey, finding in worse a dependence that he thought he had bypassed.
The search for mastery can be understood as an attempt to avoid negotiation with the other. If we take the idea of Michel Fize who considers the group, the adolescents peers, as a transitional space between parental dependence and autonomy, it is the product ─ controllable─ (for the young people in difficulty of separation) – that occupies this function. Thus, the product prevents the anxiety and avoids or even escape the relationship to the other.
Jeammet P. (2001) goes on to explain that “addictive behaviors are particularly prevalent in some adolescents with difficulties in empowerment”. Through these behaviors, these young people allow a space for themselves, where the parents can not interfere. The link to the other, especially to the parents, is undermined and can, in some situations, become pathological …
Jeammet, P. Corcos, P. (2001). Spécificité des enjeux psychopathologiques à l’adolescence, L’évolution des problématiques à l’adolescence, Douin : Paris
Marcelli, D. (1994). Du lien précoce au lien d’addiction, Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance, numéro (7), p.279-284.
Morel, A., Hervé, B., Fontaine, B., (1997), Soigner les toxicomanes, Dunod : Paris
