Éduquer et soigner les adolescents difficiles : la place de l’aide judiciaire contrainte dans le traitement des troubles des conduites

Abstract: French penal juvenile justice maintains specific relation with psychiatry and psychopathology. The minority excuse on which it is based leads to a paradigm of relations between justice and psychiatry that is very different from the one established for adult penal system; in the latter, this relation is built on forensic psychiatric approaches opposing treatment to sanction and judicial logic to psychiatric logic. The French juvenile justice system differs from this point of view because it states that juvenile delinquents are always more or less irresponsible; the judicial responses to their delinquent acting have to give priority to education on repression. This leads this system to give a central role to the appraisal of the juvenile delinquents’ personality, that is to say to their psychic functioning; any judicial response has then to give a central space to educational and protective concerns assuming that there are no delinquent conducts that are not the expression of an educational and a psychic difficulty. Then the logic behind this assumption is not as much nosographical as it is psychopathological (with reference to a phenomenological or psychodynamic theory); the most important is not then the disorder diagnostic label but a comprehensive perspective addressing the subject''s psychic functioning pattern. This strong integration of judicial and clinical approaches is then one of the most characteristic specificity of the French juvenile justice system. It deeply influences the way the educational agencies, depending of this system, carry out their task. After an epidemiological approach of the population followed by these agencies, this paper will describe the most frequent psychopathological mechanisms that are found in those who are the most difficult to attend, because of the importance of their acting and their reluctance to tolerate the institutional responses given to them. Two main theoretical axes are proposed to explain these mechanisms: the deprivation theory due to Winnicott and dominant in the English school, and the narcisico-objectal theory due to P. Jeammet, currently central in the French school. We will show that these two theoretical approaches are less opposed than complementary because they both state that external reality has a major influence on the psychic functioning of the concerned subjects. Examining the laws on which is grounded the penal juvenile justice (mainly the 2nd February 1945 order) and the interpretations given to this order since its enactment, the paper describes the practical way used to integrate protection and sanction. It shows that the attempt to abandon this close integration undermine the possibilities to establish network collaborative approaches of difficult adolescents. It then advocates for an increasing attention to this integration around approaches basing clinical approaches on educational activities designed to mediate the relation between the young delinquent and the educational staff, importing in the judicial educational context the well-known principles of milieu therapy in adolescent psychiatry. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]