This proposal is an answer to the NW 21 Special Call. It focusses on internal diversity of future nurses. In this paper I will present a part of my PhD research results about nurses’training in France. First, I will present the specificities of this training course, compared to other national approaches of this training in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany and Italy). In this research, I propose to consider the moment of the nurses’training as a time of ‘professional adolescence’. Louis-Marie Bossard, a French reseacher, proposed to transpose the adolescent psychic processes, to the transition from the student situation to the professional situation : it is called ‘professional adolescence’ (Bossard 2000, 2001, 2004).  My research is situated in the field of ‘Education and Psychoanalysis’ and more specifically in a ‘clinical approach psychoanalytically orientated in Education and training’ (Blanchard-Laville, Chaussecourte, Hatchuel & Pechberty, 2005).

In this paper I propose to question the link to children of a nursing student I have decided to call Alice. Her professional plan is to work in paediatrics departement in a hospital. I met her twice, for two clinical interviews for research at the end of her first year of training (June 2021) and at the end of her second year of training (June 2022).

During the first interview, Alice was very smiling and cheerful. However, I have been very troubled during this meeting without being able to clarify the reason for this feeling. Later, on when listening again to that interview to analyse it, I have been surprised by the dissonance between her joyful attitude and the tone of her talk. Her words were full of anxiety linked with approaching patient’s death. She contrasted geriatric care, she feels linked to death, to paediatric care. This disturbance in me came to the surface in a third phase, when I made a slip of the tongue (lapsus linguae) while presenting the analysis of this interview during a conference a few months after the interview had occurred : orally I have exchanged the word ‘geriatrics’ to ‘paediatrics’ to refer to the death of patients as Alice perceives it, while I had written the opposite in my paper. This event led me to link my own disorder to the « disturbance » described by Georges Devereux (1967) about the researcher's counter-transference as a research tool (Chaussecourte, 2017).

I wondered about the negative part carried by the affects expressed by Alice and on what was played negatively in the expression of my disorder regarding the death of the children.

In this proposal, I would like to draw on André Green’s research on ‘the work of the negative’ (Green, 2011), to analyse this situation by considering the two forms of life and death narcissism, the foundation of a form of internal alterity expressing in the negative by a mortifying desire for the children.  

On another way, if we consider, as Bernard Golse does, that adolescence is a period of reactivation in the deferred action of the enigma of the secret of origins (Golse, 2014), we could link ‘the baby that the adolescent thinks he was, that he would like to have been, or that he fears to have been’ (Biot, Golse, 2017), and Alice's desire to work with children, as many other nursing students, while they begin training sometimes even before the age of eighteen. Then, during the nursing training, how are adolescence and professional adolescence knitted together ? In this internal diversity, how are formed the links between ‘the baby in the adolescent’ (Golse, 2014) and the ‘adolescent in the adult ’ (Green, 1992) ?

My research approach considers the unconscious in a Freudian sense and takes into account its manifestations in order to propose theoretical hypothesis. My research is a qualitative one based on a longitudinal cohort of four nursing students. The data collection method is the clinical interview for research. All in all, ten clinical research interviews will be conducted with the students between June 2021 and June 2023. This is a non-directive interview lasting approximately forty-five minutes during which the researcher speaks as less as possible. The aim is to influence the interviewee's words the less as possible. The interview begins with a ‘guideline’ well prepared. This is the only intervention prepared by the researcher. The interview guideline for my research is : ‘You have chosen to become a nurse and you are in training at the training institute of Xxxx. Today, what would you say about what you are experiencing in training ? I would like you to talk to me as spontaneously and as freely as possible, as it comes to you’. The interviewee's talk is supported by the researcher's open attitude, his look, the use of the interviewee’s own word to make the interview goes again, and a respect for silences when they serve to elaborate the interviewee's thought. This requires constant work for me, on my implications, on my posture and on my identity as a researcher insofar as I am a trainer in a nursing school. During the clinical interview, the researcher does not take notes, but is entirely available to receive the interviewee's words. In the immediate defferred action of the interview, I write my feelings, my impressions, my first associations. I also write notes about the general environment of the interview. The interviews are recorded, transcribed and fully anonymised. The analysis of the interviews is done in several steps : first, the analysis of the researcher's interventions, to perceive the way in which he influenced the interviewee's ideas. Second, the analysis of the manifest content which describes what the interviewee intentionally said, with a chronological way of identifying the themes addressed. Then, the analysis of the latent content which is a way to enlightening a part of the inconscious psychic process for the interviewee. The tool for this latent content analysis is the researcher's counter-transference (Chaussecourte, 2017, 124).

The analysis of the manifest content of the two interviews conducted with Alice one year apart will allow perceiving the evolution of her representations of the care provided to the children. The process of professional adolescence also seems to be discerned in the negative, in the way Alice defends herself from the care of paediatric patients of her age. She expresses her embarrassment at caring for patients of the same age as her. In this part of the interview, she elaborates on the techniques she uses to feel professional with patients whom the institution orders her to use the first person plural (‘vous’ in French) when she could consider them as peers outside the hospital. In the latent content analysis, the elaboration of my counter-transference refers to my own link to the children. It is probably my own trauma that manifests itself in the counter-transference, allowing a glimpse of Alice's mortifying desire for the children. However, she seems to be able to heal them through a working-off mechanism that makes her creative in the care she gives them. I hypothesise that this creativity is the expression of a professional psychic growth (Blanchard-Laville, 2019), perceived in the second interview, a sign that Alice is changing professionally. Finally, I wish to discuss these analyses by referring to the theory of nursing care developed in Switzerland by Michel Nadot (2013). This author considers the diversity inherent in the nurse’s functions, whom he describes as cultural intermediaries because they are at the intersection between health institutions, the people being cared for and their entourage, and the medical profession. It is in this environment and in the learning of this function that Alice builds herself as a future subject-caregiver.

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