About
TAFSAN is a center for the adolescents of today who, searching for what would enable them to build a life of desire, fail and find themselves dropping out of the institutions allocated to them by adult society: schools, boarding-schools, youth movements, the military and so on. They drop out in body or spirit, studies or behavior, distance themselves from parents' home, school, adult society or the company of peers, even to the point of losing their entire world and their lives.
First the dropout addresses the school and the parents’ home, the first to bear the guilt and anxiety of the dropout, signs of a shared failure of the adults and the adolescent.
The Center was founded for these adolescents, parents and schools: for the adolescent who is about to “go over the cliff”, running off not seeing where he/she is heading, for the parents who do not know where the cliff is and for the school as a system too occupied " to come out from somewhere and catch them".
For every adolescent in distress there is his/her own “cliff” which means one can only “catch them”. This is the special knowledge for the sake of which the Center was founded.
In the field of adolescence there is something that no longer works with the master’s discourse even when this discourse is disguised as “science”. We should aim to establish a discourse of “adolescent pain”. Both adolescents and adults bear this adolescent pain – which is why the Center is designed to welcome adolescents, parents and educational institutions.
Among the founding members of TAFSAN are professionals in the fields of education, law, psychology, social work, art and medicine, with rich experience in working with youth in the clinical and educational systems. The Center's orientation is psychoanalytic and its practice relies on the experience of similar centers in other countries.
TAFSAN was founded as a non-profit organization in 2014 by Gabriel Dahan and a group of 17 founding members.