50

"The evolution of infanatile sexuality, followed by the latency period, leads to real psychical work in the ego during the juvenile period because of the pubertal crisis characterized by the sexualized transformation of the body and by giving up parental figures from childhood.In this juvenile process, the movement of the drives is always linked to the affect and to developing internal repesentation.The hazards of the psychical work in the ego can liberate sexual excitation and pure affects conducive to conflictual situations.The clinical example of anorexia nervosa in the young girl reveals the inability of the ego to channel the charge of the drives which then degrades into excitation requiring massive defenses such as repression and disqualifying the alimentary object which has become a source of excitation which then needs to be extinguished.At another level, interiorizing the desubjectivation of the ego-ideal of the object leads to a high risk of narcissistic loss and of deconstruction of the ego, without the possibility of getting support from a group identity as is often the case in adolescence.Repression as a « second censorship » in Freud is the ultimate defense of the ego faced with an emergence of drive excitation; the risk involves impoverishing the ego as much in its primary identity as in a process of libidinal, narcissistic and objectal binding when post-oedipal identifications are created during the juvenile crisis."