The work of adolescence and work with adolescents
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The concept of "work" is implicit in all of Freud's work. It designates an activity of mediation and struggle with an object, internal and/or external, that hinders the subject by imposing a transformation. The natural model of such work is adolescence as a process of revolutionary psychic reorganization which implies a considerable creative effort to redefine the subject's identity. The society in which we live tends to trivialise this task by favouring the immediate excitatory discharge at the expense of the creativity that time entails. Therapeutic work with adolescents consists in reactivating the drama of their crisis rather than repressing it in a reassuring way. This implies trust in the adolescent's nascent creative abilities and at the same time the suspension of his "supposed knowledge" in order to win him back together in the construction of a common work space. Two clinical examples exemplify this process.
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