Cognet-Kayem, Anna <br/><br/>
An Adolescence of Yesteryear 

 -  2006.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 43 
<br/><br/> At the end of his life, François Mauriac evokes a delusive conviction that briefly assailed him when he was about ten years old: his father, who died when he himself was only twenty months old, was believed in reality to have always been alive. Drawing from elements of the author’s life, and particularly his close relationship with the Christian faith, we propose the hypothesis that, for this young boy, puberty was the moment of a psychological trauma, likely to provoke regressive movements, without inducing the establishment of a psychotic structure. Maybe this almost pathological moment was an attempt to compensate for the absence of his father by generating a hallucination of him.