Parental Break Up. Clinical guidelines and consequences for education.

by | Vol 24 (2) 2006

The author focuses on the meaning that the break-up of an elderly couple has for their child(ren) and refers to some principles formulated by Françoise Dolto: 1. the recognition of the child as a person that makes its own choices; 2. “to say nothing is a way of speaking”; 3. the assurance of continuity; and 4. visiting duties as opposed to visiting rights. These principles function as guidelines for work with children whose parents have separated. Using a clinical fragment, the author argues that these guidelines are not to be taken as universally applicable but rather their value lies in the possibilities they offer to the subject to express something of its particular truth.

Related articles

  • Sexuality and the Real in Psychosis. Clinical Vignette

    This article deals with the case-study of a psychotic subject in which jouissance and the fragmented body play a dominant role. The jouissance of an abusive mother is inscribed on the body of this subject, a subject who is compelled to mutilate his or her body in order to ensure its unity and as such to make it his or her own. It is the same mother with her same jouissance, that appears in the Real to this subject. Through…

  • Clinical Considerations about Addiction: In Search of the Addicted Subject

    In this contribution the author examines the specificity of a psychoanalytic orientation in clinical work with addicts. A psychoanalytic approach focuses on the subject and his discontent, rather than on the object, the consumed substance, and does not limit itself to the trivia of the substance use but searches for that for which the drug or alcohol use is a solution. A psychoanalytic focus on addiction aims at what lies beyond the supposedly simple stimulus-response cycle of need and its…

  • How ‘normal’ is ‘pathological’? Psychiatry and clinical psychology as a new means of disciplining.

    This contribution originates with a number of problems in the current psychodiagnostic and therapeutic field which give rise to important ethical, clinical and scientific questions: questions that, from a broader social perspective, are interrelated. The criteria for psychopathology depend on socially decided norms and values (ethics), which coincide with the societal context. Current neoliberal discourse dictates a medical model that determines the manner in which scientific research is conducted, resulting in so-called evidence-based DSM-based diagnostics. In the clinic, this psychiatric…