Archives de catégorie : ENG – Corps et société aujourd’hui – 2011 T. 29 n°3

Alejandro Rojas-Urrego : just call me love and i’ll be rebaptized

The state of being in love in adolescence often takes on the form of passion and the accents of tragedy. It is also as much feared as sought after, not only as re-encounter and repetition, « republishing of old news » as Freud writes, but also as a new discovery, creative dynamism, transforming invention. Henceforth it represents a second baptism, a new birth which must sometimes disavow the first. To love is to be reborn. To undo oneself, in order to redo oneself in a better way, to recreate oneself. At the risk, of course, of losing oneself forever. The state of being in love in adolescence demands the psychoanalyst’s attention. Clinical experience sometimes confronts us with psychical breakdowns in the wake of romantic disappointments. They reveal the quality of the narcissistic foundations of the adolescent whose identity is suffering. More a reviviscence than a reminiscence. In such situations, where representations are lacking to us, literature can be a big help. It can enable us to put into words a story which has none. Using Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the author suggests several possible lines of interpretation of love in adolescence involving notion of the sexual body, narcissism, death, orgasm, name.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 683-705.

Philippe Gutton : transgressing or transcribing

When the author (M. Hatzfeld) speaks of the « wild vitality » that shoots up in the wake of youth, I think that it is the adolescent processes which make adolescence alive, pubertary sublimation wrongly interpreted as transgression by the social response. Creative freedom, if we conceive of it in this way, never comes alone.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 673-676.

Johanne Rosier : the house of Bernarda Alba : the disavowal of the feminine and the refusal of change

Frederico Garcia Lorca’s drama « The Bernarda Alba’s home » unveils the life of five girls plunged by their mother into an eight years mourning. Adela, the youngest daughter will begin a violent fight against her mother which will seal her femininity’s fate. The central question has to do with the vagaries of the bipartition of the subjectivation between continuity and change.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 665-671.

Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils : do pupils suffer at school ? unspoken « ordinary » academic suffering

With second modernity, the construction of the meaning of a school system in the throes of de-institutionalization is no longer transcendent but immanent for pupils. The question of school experience and how students feel about their academic life needs to be raised. Our investigation leads us to posit that the feeling of academic suffering is becoming structural, albeit collectively disavowed. This article tries to shed light on the meaning of this collective disavowal and social « disappearing » of academic suffering, by the yardstick of contemporary social mutations, before setting up an ideal-typical typology of forms of pupils’ academic suffering.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 637-664.

Henri Flavigny : psychiatric emergencies and/or crisis centers ?

In order to respond adequately and quickly to teenagers’ behavioral troubles, not only the way of acting, but most of all the meaning of what we do must be considered.

Indeed, it is the meaning which forces the responders to keep at their disposal a variety of solutions : non-psychiatric, non-medical « crisis centers » are some of these ; they should be organized at social and community level. Others responses are « Psychiatric Emergency Units ». However, these structures should not work on their own, but must be linked with all the units of a « Psychiatric Intersector ».

If our urgency answers respect the meaning of the adolescent’s question asked by his behavioral troubles, they can be efficient, and the crisis times can represent a positive contribution to his evolution.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 627-636.

Marie-Jeanne Guedj : emergencies in adolescence

The author offers some reflections on the basis of experience in a general emergency psychiatric center, which each year receives 700 youths under the age of eighteen, and a reading of Henri Flavigny’s 1984 article on emergency responses to adolescence. The emergency is actually a societal phenomenon which worsens in times of crisis. This article treats the complex temporalities of adolescence and of the emergency, a process which is both intrinsic and environmental, which may or may lead to the emergency ward, just as an emergency may or may not be present in times of crisis. Paranoia is activated in this, and is sometimes the only way of questioning what is false when compromise is not possible. In this way the emergency appears as the receptacle for the impossible adolescence, when subjectivity is at an impasse. It is revealed in an unexpected way as a place for speaking and listening.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 615-626.

Jacques Dayan : autonomy as value

This article discusses the idea that the concept of responsibility for Self has for several generations been a dominant representation of the relationship between the individual and the socius. One of the principle hypotheses put forward by the author is that the (relative) irresponsibility of the Self is associated with the extent of its delegation of its protection of itself to the state. These modifications would then echo the socio-economic transformations and cross over, as we will show, into the field of the human sciences. They manifest themselves, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, in an evolution of the complaint and the greater emphasis on « narcissistic » disorders. It is still uncertain whether these transformations have a consistent affect on adolescent behavior beyond the role it seems to have regularly played : that of a social integrator, a ferry from one generation to the next.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 609-614.

Joëlle Bordet : another look at young people living in conditions of social inequality

For society and its representatives, « youths from lower class neighborhoods » overwhelmingly stand for social risk. They are perceived as a single entity in the register of social deficit or danger. In this article, we show how this attitude on the part of institutions and their representatives has the effect of placing adult worries at a distance, but does the same thing to subjective relations with youngsters. In order to recover trust and create new subjection processes for young people, we offer, with reference to work carried out in municipalities, to open up new perspectives for encounter and action, based on their desire for recognition and for a shared future.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 603-608.

Anne Tassel : responsibility without guilt ?

That the sociological coordinates of a certain state of uncertainty forces us to undertake a hermeneutic effort focused on a subjectivity that is meant to become public, and that, giving in to the movement of interiorizing responsibility, we are freed from the guilt that hampers both our acts and our action, the observation made by A. Ehrenberg about contemporary work on adolescence. Though promising, it seems to pass over the more painful aspects, such as guilt anxiety, whose counterpart is the work of fantasy.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 595-601.

Daniel Marcelli : adolescents and society : remarks on neurotic organizations and their development over time

Subjectivation, which is characteristic of the psychical work of adolescence, is first of all an appropriation by the subject of his body and his thinking. This psychical work is paradigmatic of the social beliefs that we share : symptoms and even more psychical defenses, incontestably evolve over time, apart from the unconscious which may be conceived of as outside time. Thus, symptomatic expression is constantly caught up in the evolution of social values.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 585-593.