Empiètement imagoïque et saut dans le vide de l’adolescent en échec scolaire : Etude de cas.

Abstract

This thesis is titled “Imagoic encroachment and leap into the void of the adolescent in school failure: case study”. In Cameroon, a year does not go by without reports of at least one suicide case or suicide attempts by overwhelmed adolescent candidates following failure in official school examinations. The suicide attempt is a sort of acting out, it is one way among others for them (students) to express what they are unable to speak out (Roussillon, 2015). The acting out comes as a result of the absence of a necessary and timely communication between the teenager who is failing in school and the family (parents) (Valle, 2008, p.247). The adolescent’s school failure thus upsets his internal life and that of his family. The mirror function of the family, which is a major element in the narcissistic regulation of the child, undergoes significant disorganization, the adolescent subject then lives a narcissistic frustration that he endures without being able to identify the source of his unhappiness. Thus, we hypothesized that the imagoic encroachment through its mechanisms, accounts for the leap into the void of the adolescent in a situation of school failure. Using the case study method, data was collected from 03 different adolescents, all of whom had attempted suicide due to failure in a school examination. At the end of the analysis, it appears that a leap into the void of the adolescent following school failure, is the manifestation of links between two infantile lives. On the one hand; there is the link between the child who remains alive with a parent with trauma, injuries and fantasies. On the other hand, the adolescent child who is in the process of building his identity and goes through periods of crisis (developmental task).