Trouble de stress post - traumatique et capacités de symbolisation chez les victimes de conflits armés

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the traumatic experience, potentiated by the blockage of environmental filtration functions, presence in the world and the function of love and relationship with others, affects the symbolisation capacity of internally displaced adolescent persons in Cameroon. The issue of trauma and the meaning that the traumatic experience has for each individual means that the links between the environment and the displaced person need to be considered in terms of two psychoanalytical analytical frameworks: the drive mode, in which the displaced person is the subject of desires in the unconscious, endowed with subjectivity (Freud (1923), Lacan (1962)), and the relational mode, which regulates the link between individual psychic spaces and intersubjective spaces (Brusset (2006), Kaës (2009)). The group therefore plays the role of protecting and transmitting psychic life between group members. But when this link is broken, the internally displaced person is no longer able to identify and initiate the suturing or healing process that will enable them to overcome their psychological and social suffering. The data collected from the internally displaced persons at the Trauma Centre Cameroun Association was based on an interview guide. Following analysis of the material collected, the main findings reveal that the death of loved ones is a difficult ordeal to overcome, especially in the subject's new environment where he or she can no longer filter stimuli from the outside world. As a result, the subject's frustrations become a way of protecting themselves from the identity, cultural, social, family and school environment in which they are living. As a result, they feel lost and discouraged; they no longer have a sense of purpose, let alone motivation, as their future seems bleak and uncertain. This feeling puts them in a state of psychological and social vulnerability, giving them the impression of having to pay a symbolic debt in order to belong to the world. All this leads to a significant alteration and reshaping of the internally displaced person's post-traumatic personality. The subjects witness, or are confronted with, one or more events during which people close to them or far away died or were threatened with death. What's more, the traumatic shock these people have suffered has the particularity of being repeated in the form of forced memories or nightmares. Psychological suffering can be pervasive and have a major impact on social functioning and adaptation to a new way of life.