UNIVERSITY OF POITIERS

Doctoral School « Cognition, Comportements et Langage(s) » (ED 527)

Clinical Laboratory of the Act and PsychoSexuality (EA 4050)

Nathalie PERNET

THESIS

In order to obtain the

Doctorate of Clinical Psychology

Clinical Study on the Psychological Impact of the Suicide of the Father Figure on Adolescent Developpment 

Thesis directed by

Pascal-Henri KELLER

And

Marion HAZA

Presented and publicly supported

November 20, 2015

Composition of the jury:

Mister professor Pascal-Henri KELLER, Supervisor, University of Poitiers

Miss Marion HAZA, Co-Directrice de thèse, lecturer, University of Poitiers

Miss professor Marie-Frédérique BACQUÉ, protractor, University of Strasbourg

Mister professor Florian HOUSSIER, protractor, University of Paris 13

Monsieur Patrick BEN SOUSSAN, Child Psychiatrist

Regional Center for Fight Against Cancer, Marseille

Mister Jean-Jacques CHAVAGNAT, Child Psychiatrist

Hospital Center Henri Laborit, Poitiers

Miss professor Daniel DERIVOIS, University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté

Miss Nathalie De KERNIER, lecturer, University of Paris 10

ABSTRACT

Title : Clinical Study on the Psychological Impact of the Suicide of the Father Figure on Adolescent Developpment

This thesis aims to study the psychopathology of adolescence. It focuses on the psychological processes teenagers undergo when the traumatic event that is the suicide of the father figure takes place between puberty and legal adulthood.

This present study was conducted among adolescents aged 12 to 17, bereaved by the suicide of their father. Data was collected by conducting recorded interviews with five adolescents attending the same youth services (a Centre Médico-Psycho-Pédagogique – a medical and psychological learning centre dedicated to the young) over a period of three years. All recorded interviews were transcribed, and out of them emerged detailed life-stories. This research method brought to light the specific issues adolescent subjects experience, issues pertaining to the suicide of the father figure as a traumatic event and the impact it has on adolescent development. The clinical sessions demonstrated different theoretical and methodological standpoints. This thesis opens with a detailed literature review, to which succeeds both a discussion of the theoretical framework chosen for this particular research, and an explanation the hypotheses. The subjects’ life-stories, as well as other clinical data, show how bereavement compels the adolescent psyche to face the reality of grief, loss and separation. The clinical, methodological and theoretical consequences of this approach are then developed in the last part and in the conclusion of the thesis.

From a clinical point of you, we observed that orphan adolescents fight against the risk of collapsing, and struggle with a defence mechanism that seems psychotic. A particularity of this type of grief also emerges: the adolescent subject looses his/her ideals, and specifically illusions related to the love object.

Paradoxically, the adolescent subject also experiences the absence of the object as a persecuting inner presence. The ego’s inner objects are threatened by the persecuting guilt of this inner presence, which also jeopardizes the pubertal process that should have led the adolescent subject to separate from his/her parents. The accrued distress amounts to an insidious trauma, whose psychological impact on adolescent development manifests itself with a gaping narcissistic wound.

Overall, this approach, which is a psychotherapeutic - and therefore relational - follow-up, enables the grieving adolescent to claim his/her life story and to not think of him/herself as an isolated subject, but as a subject afflicted with the experience of grief, loss and separation. It ought to be mentioned that the results of this method have made it possible to open a reflection towards a clinical practice focused on the inexhaustible field that is the psychological life of the adolescent subject.

Methodology: 1) qualitative study on the subjective experience of adolescents grieving their father; 2) target population: girls and boys aged 12 to 20, who have experienced that same type of grief; 3) theoretical framework: clinical research proceeds from psychoanalytic metapsychology which provides the theoretical tools that are crucial to appreciate intrapsychic and relational stages.

Keywords : Suicide, Father Figure, Death, Trauma, Loss, Bereavement, Mourning, Grief, Adolescence