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There are three possible ways of access to phenomena of suffered violence: the first is the experience of those who have suffered violence themselves; the second is the experience of eyewitnesses; the third, which is the most frequent one, is an indirect access through the testimony of people belonging to the first two categories. Each way of access has advantages but also serious difficulties, both in terms of the objectivity of the experience and of the possibility to express it in language. No one is free from an affective and a normative dimension; this implies that there is a certain tension with regard to the phenomenological reduction. The paper offers an analysis of these ways of access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé Objectifs La théorie de l’attachement dans le domaine du vieillissement propose une approche nouvelle et pertinente pour comprendre la clinique du sujet âgé et les enjeux de ses relations à autrui. La vieillesse rend parfois le sujet vulnérable physiquement et psychiquement et l’inscrit dans une relation de dépendance à autrui. Cet article pose l’hypothèse d’une spécificité de l’attachement chez le sujet âgé. Méthode Cet écrit rend compte des premiers résultats d’une étude en cours visant à évaluer l’attachement chez des sujets âgés de plus de 65 ans. En utilisant une procédure d’analyse d’entretiens semi-structurés, inspirée du paradigme de l’attachement (Edicode), deux situations cliniques parmi les vingt situations rencontrées sont présentées pour illustrer deux profils d’attachement particuliers. Les sujets de cette étude ont participé à un entretien clinique semi-structuré enregistré, retranscrit puis analysé selon la méthode d’évaluation Edicode en double cotation, ont rempli avec l’aide du chercheur une échelle d’attachement (Questionnaire des Échelles de Relations), une échelle de santé (Indicateur de Santé Perceptuelle de Nottingham) et une échelle d’anxiété et de dépression (HAD). Résultats Les données issues de ces deux illustrations montrent l’importance de considérer les formes d’énonciation du récit et la mise en forme des expériences subjectives souvent douloureuses chez le public âgé. Ce récit permet d’évaluer le niveau d’élaboration des pertes liées à l’âge et la capacité pour le sujet d’y associer des affects. Nous observons également un lien entre ce degré d’élaboration des pertes et le profil d’attachement du sujet. Discussion À partir du constat d’un grand nombre de sujets détachés au grand âge comparativement à la population générale, nous discutons l’hypothèse d’une spécificité de l’attachement détaché dans la vieillesse. Le détachement serait une tentative plus ou moins opérante pour le sujet de lutter contre l’effondrement et la dépression liés aux pertes mais aussi à la raréfaction des relations. Conclusion Il n’existe pas d’effet de causalité simple du passé sur le présent dans l’attachement et le détachement peut s’entendre comme un mécanisme de dégagement ultime. L’aidant doit entendre l’angoisse que suscite la relation pour ces personnes contraintes de dépendre des autres. Objectives The attachment theory in the area of gerontology offers a new and relevant paradigm for the clinical understanding of the elderly and their style of relationship. Old age can sometimes make subjects more vulnerable physically as well as psychologically, while ageing people tend to be more dependent on others. This article hypothesises that attachment in the ageing process has specific features. Method This paper shows the first results from a recent study assessing attachment among people aged 65 and over. The approach is based on the attachment paradigm (Edicode protocol), and implemented semi-structured interviews. Two examples selected from 20 cases encountered are presented to illustrate two specific attachment styles. The semi-structured interviews were transcribed and analysed following the Edicode method, with double scoring. Respondents also completed different scales under supervision by the researcher: an attachment scale (Relationship Scales Questionnaire), a general health scale (Nottingham Health Profile) and an anxiety and depression scale (HADS). Results The results for the two examples used in this article show the interest of taking into account the different forms of enunciation of the narrative, as well as the way subjective, often painful experiences are told. The narrative enables an assessment of how far the elderly subject is able to cope with various age-related losses, and how they express their emotions about these losses. We observed a link between the level of representation of losses and the attachment style. Discussion Given the numbers of people with detached attachment style in old age compared to attachment in the general population, we can hypothesise that attachment during ageing has particular features. Elderly people may try to fight off collapse and depression by a detached attachment style helping them to endure losses and waning relationships. Conclusion The past attachment style does not always explain the current attachment style, and the detached style can be seen as a final attempt to escape. Caregivers should be aware that dependent persons may fear relationships because they generate anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author explores the clinical presentation of two patients who have recourse to fetishistic solutions. In one case, that of addictive sexuality, the patient is a foot fetishist; in the other, the fetishism takes the form of cross-dressing. In her discussion of the clinical material, the author develops issues raised by contemporary psychoanalysts concerning the Freudian metapsychology of perversion, the paradigm for which is fetishism. Contemporary ideas on fetishism have much less to do with sexual issues as such and more to do with the vicissitudes of primary narcissism: the fetishistic solution involves, above all, a primitive sense of identity that goes beyond sexual identification and object choice. The author then shows how some forms of so-called perverse sexual behaviour may in fact be an attempt to rebuild earlier deficiencies in the self's relationship with the primary object. With non-neurotic patients, the therapeutic process consists in bringing to the fore what was missed out in the primary organization of self-identity and in restoring the dimension of affect-failures that evoke the absence, in the primary environment, of any sharing of affect or mirroring potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The question of time in psychoses has been studied more often as lived time (perceived) than as discursive time (abstract). The specificity of lived time in psychosis can disturb the modes of “intrigue setting” (‘mise en intrigue’ according to Ricœur seems to translate lived time into a narrative process), particularly as concerns lack of dating or excess of dating. In this paper, the authors study the phenomenon they have named “hyperdating” and its defensive function in psychosis. “Hyperdating” would be a function of overdating, illustrating the distance between the patient who “hyperdates” and the affective charge he feels. “Hyperdating” would then consist in a radical lack of the dating function. The purpose of dating would not be to tag events temporally in order to organize the narrative chronologically, but to proceed to evacuate the meaning out of the event by designating only its date. In fact, we suppose that the affect would be shifted onto this date, and thus disconnected with the representation of the event for which there are representational deficiencies and probably a very intensive original affective load. Dating is a vehicle of chronology, and is the manifestation of a faculty for the narrative of self to become an autobiography as temporal experience. We suppose that in psychosis, this process is inefficient. In fact, there is either a lack of dating of narrative events, or a “hyperdating” which overloads narrative with temporal pseudo-indicators, in particular through quasi-sacred dates. “Hyperdating” would therefore be a defensive psychic process against the traumatic load connected to the remembrance of the event, transferring the central characteristics to the date itself, which would then be exterior to any meaningful chronology. The authors propose to define this “hyperdating” phenomenon, and to investigate its psychic function. The methodology is qualitative, and based on two clinical cases, one of schizophrenia, the other of mania. A single case of schizophrenia: We think that in schizophrenia the “hyperdating” phenomenon could be underlain by a schism between affect and representation. This is an isolating process which fits into a psychotic dissociation, recalling the break characterising schizophrenic temporality. The speech is centred on a time-based accuracy to the detriment of experience narration and its affective expression. It then seems that “hyperdating” enables the person to avoid the huge traumatic load related to the factual content in order to shift the affective load on the dating itself. A single case of mania: Here “hyderdating” would be the expression of a game with dates in an omnipotent process. This game appears as a mosaic, a disjointed and blurred control attempt lacking a linear temporal trajectory. In mania, a cumulated series of dates does not ensure either temporal links or any necessary “temporalisation” for “intrigue setting”. Time is one of the forms of “discontinuity and hopping” frozen in instantaneity. “Hyperdating” reveals a need to control the temporal flux which can only fail and it is, under a chronological appearance, an expression of a temporality frozen on the return of the same. The lack of temporal succession and of alternatives to “temporalisation” of events by means of a date which freezes them and removes their affective dimension can only render the reflexive capture of an identity through a biographic narrative problematic. Conclusion: Thus, other than the discrepancies related to the specificity of the “hyperdating” process in the psychic economy of psychotic patients, there would be some similarities concerning “hyperdatation” in psychoses such as abortive attempts of intrigue restoration, deadlock of the chronological function of dating, but also freezing of temporalisation on a number. These illustrate the schism or the instantaneity, devoid of any temporal flux and therefore of any link with “withholding” (apprehension of what has just occurred) and with “protention” (intuition of the immediate future), which characterise time experience according to Husserl. The limits of our study are rooted in the difficulty of identifying this phenomenon as it seems to occur less often than those concerning forgetting or lack of dating. Furthermore the links between “hyperdating” and the affect management process as well as the differences of those links within the different types of psychosis will need to be investigated more thoroughly. That is why the prospects of this study could be the following ones: interrogating the links between “hyperdating” and memory in psychoses. (Is the “hyperdating” phenomenon a failed attempt to recover memories, and/or an attempt to shape raw mnesic traces?); further investigations of the psychotic temporality issue; therapeutic contributions in the management of time and affects could be based on these previous points as far as it seems that it is only through the flexibility of such a defence that the patient will reach the affects and integrate them in an intersubjective relationship with the therapist. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]