Bernard, Alexandra
Obese body, sexual body and process of family differentiation in adolescence
- 2020.
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The authors look into the question of the psychic reorganizations underlying the process of slimming in obese adolescents receiving treatment in a specialized centre during the school year. In a boarding school context where the young people are away from their family environment, the process of slimming involved in the medical treatment is associated with the enactment of exacerbated behavioural manifestations with a sexual valency which are similar in all these adolescents. It is then more difficult for the professional carers to provide group containing and the instinctual drive excesses of the adolescents represent recurrent and sometimes even violent attacks on the setting. What meaning can be given, in this transition from the obese body to the sexual body in this specific period of adolescence, to the massive and sudden aspect of these instinctual drive behavioural excesses which burst onto the group and individual stage and attack the setting?