The processes linking meaning, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity constitute a central challenge for understanding life trajectories marked by dark times, particularly experiences of entrapment or violence during childhood. This presentation explores the conditions of possibility of speech, as well as the processes of elaboration unfolding within the temporal dynamics of subjectivation and relational life.

Cultural psychology, in the tradition of Vygotsky and subsequent developments, addresses the effects of constraining environments on human development. Following Bakhtin, a path-breaking figure in the vibrant dialogical current, dialogical psychology is grounded in a conception of mind as fundamentally relational. In this presentation, this framework is mobilized to examine dialogical processes and meaning-making, as well as their disruptions under conditions of violence and entrapment, through a fine-grained analysis of discourse, its polyphonies, self-positions, and dynamics of sense.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence, this communication conceptualizes entrapment not as a form of power but as a radical rupture of the dialogical bond, and adopts a psychodynamic perspective attentive to the singularity of the subject.

This analysis is supported by an in-depth case study embedded within broader research devoted to desire, based on a corpus of more than 250 authentic therapeutic interviews in clinical sexology.

Among other findings, the analyses demonstrate that subtle discursive variations accompany shifts in self-positions and intersubjective dynamics. These findings open toward a renewed understanding of elaborative processes in traumatic contexts, where dominant clinical frameworks tend to posit a relative fixation or rigidity of psychic organization.