“Cinema as a therapeutic mediation in adolescence”
This thesis proposes to discuss the use of short films as therapeutic mediation in the context of a group work with adolescents and thus analyses the development of this setting, created to allow a subjective appropriation of experiences not yet symbolised. The cinema has been already used as a therapeutic tool by other clinicians, but its potentialities as a therapeutic mediation were never studied and explored. As part of a therapeutic practice in two psychiatric hospitals, in a medical-psychological center and in two centers for Adolescents (Maison des Adolescents), a group with cinema as therapeutic mediation was proposed to patients (adolescents), either as part of a therapeutic writing group or as part of a therapeutic speaking group.
During the group, the verbal and mimo-gesto-postural associations are observed, privileging the expression of sensory-perceptive-motor language and wondering about adolescent processes in relation with the short films in the transfero-countertransference relationship, based on group dynamics, especially groups with therapeutic mediation.
This research shows that adolescents who are receivers or spectators of the cinematographic work are analysed by this work (Green) and that it is received according to the countertransference of its spectator in echo with his problematic. Then, it shows how the psychic apparatus of adolescents is mobilised in this setting through therapeutic work, from the group associative chain, together with the verbal and mimo-gesto-postural associations. One can even see a sort of narrative of the film during the session ; manifestations of adolescent’s countertransference may be at a corporal level or at a level of language and of action. This thesis also supports the idea that the cinema as mediation functions as an attractor of transference of symbolised experiences, that their sharing in sensory-affectivo-motor level allows the emergence of a group psyche and that it (the mediation) also serves as a transitional space that symbolises symbolisation, that all the material that will come depends on the particularity of this mediator, from where it is an attractor. Group work is supposed to give meaning to experiences in search of meaning, within transfero-countertransference relationship. The therapeutic group work with cinema as a mediation then offers itself as a screen on which are projected and then represented, the material that is mobilised in the subject in a group.