The configurations of identity/otherness that characterize adolescents in war and during wartime, are extremely diminished, reduced to forms of the ideal Ego, at the expense of the debt to the Ego ideal. The condition of the child and the adolescent soldier emerges when what is happening in the war is the effect not of an amplification of fraternal wars, but rather of the moment when the least fraternal feeling towards the opponent, the enemy, the other, is reduced to nothing.
Using clinical experience with radicalized adolescent girls, the clinical analysis of one of them enables the authors to investigate the intra and inter-psychical issues of jihadist engagement. This offers a first glimpse of psychoanalytical thinking about the resonance between propaganda speeches and the trials of the pubertary. Radicalization is here seen as a symptom, potentially offering the subject a new form of protest that is adolescent and feminine.
Using a clinical vignette, the authors revisit silence and the inhibition of psychical function in adolescents. They emphasize the work of the preconscious, which plays a major role in dealing with the excitations and genitality proper to the adolescent process, and try to articulate this with a theory of therapeutic technique with adolescents.
The author explores the therapeutic potential of storytelling mediation, using her experience with a group therapeutic setting for hospitalized adolescents. How does that mediation provide the encounter with a psychoanalyst and the beginning of a therapeutic process? Regarding the symbolizing potential of storytelling, how would its use in a therapeutic setting facilitate the organization of traumatic experiences associated with puberty, echoing the dream work?
The author starts with adolescents’ propensity for using the first phase of therapeutic work to decry the personal or family circumstances that called into question the kind of the support they enjoyed earlier in life. Besides the problems of identification induced by the sexualization of identifications in adolescence, this troubling of the identifying function will at the same time bring about a much too premature encounter with the absurd.
This article starts with the case of an adolescent who refuses instruction, and shows how this refusal may be sustained by a need to preserve an identity that is called into question by the teachings. It will show the extent to which educational transmission can cause in the recipient a reorganization of identity the originality of which is therefore in doubt.
Using a study conducted with fifty-one students in preparatory programs, this article will try to show how the restraints that govern the transmission of knowledge in preparatory courses cause these students to have resort to defensive strategies which, though they permit them to struggle effectively against suffering, tend to thwart the resolution of late adolescent conflicts and deeply upset identity.
Considering the signifying value of symbols called up by adolescents’ self-inflicted wounds, their anthropological function gives access to something that, behind the purification and sacrifice, pertains to loss. In adolescence, de-filiating movements can be caught up in anxiety of Nothingness, in which loss and abandonment are joined. By representing these on the clinical stage through injuries, the acted entreaty allies itself with control to produce catharsis.
Offering some reflections about identity work and psychical transmission between generations, this article observes the relationship between these two dimensions to understand the modes of psychical subjectivation, giving a central role to the paradigm of filiation.
In the adolescent, an absence or porosity of links with infantile objects causes a crack in the potential for identification and plunges him/her into an unbearable and unsettling feeling that the Ego is uncanny. The psychotherapeutic setting enables the patient to express his hatred towards the mother or the father, within a transference onto the psychoanalyst that makes it possible to encounter another, identified as “stranger,” who is sufficiently different (sexually) and differentiated (narcissistically).
Adolescence, 2017, 35, 2, 325-333
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7