The theme of the pubertaire includes the revelation of the third dimension of the female body : the evolution at puberty of the maternal feminine. The author examines what he would call the maternal genital metaphor. Ordinarily, the erotic play of young adolescents is a symbolization of the masks of the maternal depths. In pathology there is a disavowal of the metaphor, defended by the practices of incorporation, aspects of the fetishizing of the adolescent’s body. Surface sexuality is commonplace at the beginning of adolescence. It can be perpetuated – the example of André Gide is investigated.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – L’organe et le sujet – 2003 T.21 n°3
Dominique Agostini : an adolescent in the great war : bion
Using the « War Journal » (June 1917-January 1919) of Bion and the « Commentaries » he wrote 50 years later, the author establishes links between the war experience of the adolescent Bion and certain concepts created by the analyst Bion. Most notably, those of « catastrophic change », « nameless terror », « psychotic personality », and « group mentality ».
Antoine Masson : turning back to the rupture in order to be « oneself », carried away
Through a clinical sequence held in the transference with Jeremy, who has been lost in a nasty feeling of tedium for four years, the author tries to exemplify the work of the « clinic of the event », at the level of the diagnostic mode, involving both the paradoxical situation and the subject’s attempt to recognize himself in it ; at the level of the course of the work, which consists of turning back to the breaking point of existence while sustaining oneself on various forms of the « two » brought back in the transference ; and at the level of the crossing operation which conjugates the arrival at a finishing line and the transmutation of the return in forward-moving force. The poet’s experience is used to pinpoint what is at stake in such a clinical course, which opens up the possible from a point that looks impossible.
Anne Tassel : figures of sexual indistinctness : the mangas
The play of exchange between male and female enacted by the mangas seems to satisfy the fantasy and the anxiety of sexual indistinctness in the adolescent, who is invited by this reading to « undergo a complete mutation while remaining the same »… The thematic of the mangas highlights the major impact of this fantasy of permutation of the sexes through transvestitism, while they seem to us to mask resistances to the sexual choice. The permeability between male and female figures, insisting on enacting an exhibitionism of the feminine, aims more to make the female sex « shine », to the detriment of a modification of the object relation. The adjustment of sexual ambiguity to reality, by reactivating the projective system, seems to settle for a cultural image that is both playful and complex, figuring something of the actuality of the work on sexual differentiation.
Pascal le Maléfan : spitting in the adolescent, between emission and expression
Spitting is a frequent behavior in adolescence, especially in boys, and it first appears as sign of virility showing itself. But here we will hypothesize that an incompatibility with speech, speech wherein subjectivity is implicated in an « unsaid » way, is found in this very behavior which leads the subject to abandon appearances and show, in order to venture further into speaking that supports seduction and the love relationship as a new position in the world.
Robert Malet : a dermatologist’s viewpoint
The psychosomatic approach is something like the dancer’s split, stretching out to join, on the one hand, the medical approach, whose very foundation is the isolation and objectification of the symptom, and on the other hand, the subject, with his history, his fears and his sometimes complex demands. Using several clinical observations, we will try to show some particularities of this treatment in the adolescent.
Catherine Desprats-Péquignot : from a hole in the throat to imaginary sex organs
The associative speech of a subject in relationship with an interlocutor sometimes gives rise to the classic sex/face equivalence, giving a clinical understanding of the substitutive correspondences between « low » and « high », but also of what this will come to mean for a subject, which is proper to him and unknown to him. Thus the case of Anaïs invites us to consider the correspondences among throat, gaze, eye, female genitalia, all condensed into the generic image of the « hole », in a case where the experience of a tracheotomy offers a fitting support for the expression of her psychical reality and her subjective positions.
Michel Amar : nicolas in psychodrama
Atopical eczema may lead to severe and debilitating diseases. Psychoanalytic psychodrama may help in healing these severe diseases, but mutative psychoanalytic interpretation may be impossible. Narcissistic elements contained in the group may revive the patients’ capacity for feelings and restart a psychical life capable of expressing the representation of his depression.
Robert Letendre, Pierre Doray : experience of pregnancy in adolescence
With the following three questions in mind, 1 – Why do adolescents become pregnant ? 2 – What is an adolescent’s subjective experience of her pregnancy ? and 3 – What function do pregnancy and the fetus play for the expectant adolescent mother ?, the authors conducted semi-directed interviews of 46 pregnant adolescents residing in metropolitan Montreal. Qualitative analysis revealed three principal functions of adolescent pregnancy : 1 – To repair the past and to have a better life ; 2 – To be adult and autonomous, or ; 3 – To intensify dependence on the family circle. Across these three independent groupings, notable psychological differences were found in subjective representation of the expected baby, self-image, lability, and the expectant mother’s relationships with her parents.
Daniel Marcelli : pregnancy : a painful interference in adolescent sexuality
When pregnancy occurs in adolescence, it is most often attributed to an « accident », and the medical-social response is to provide better information about contraception. But when we look closer, we often see a logic other than that of accident: adolescent girls who express, when they are permitted to speak, a desire for pregnancy or for a child. Why is an adolescent girl sometimes invaded by this desire, to the point of not being able to put if off even for a short time, and why is she ready to sacrifice a part of her adolescence to it ?
Pregnancy appears as an imperious demand for an immediate response to the questions that every adolescent girl ask herself about her potential fertility, or as the instant search to fill up an old lack : to have a baby in one’s arms.
Viewing a teenage pregnancy merely as the result of accident or of destiny singularly reduces the meaning of such an event. In particular, it is a misunderstanding of the adolescent’s suffering, of how difficult it is for the young girl to take care of herself, to take care of her body, to handle the psychical tensions inherent to sexuality, and to tolerate waiting.