Archives de catégorie : ENG – Mystique et experiences – 2008 T.26 n°1

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Jacques Arènes : psychopathology of mysticism and work of the negative

If in the past pathological figures of the religious in part issued from the question of excessive ritualization (the obsessive side of religion highlighted by Freud), couldn’t one affirm that the model of the religious is today a narcissistic one ? For the essential is no longer the aspect of control (defence against death anxiety) of the religious (the obsessive type), or the search, under the sign of lack, for the never obtained object of mystical desire (along hysterical lines), but a validation through faith that is always unfulfilled in itself, and the subject’s correlative struggle against abandonment anxiety and the loss of the bond. From this perspective, we will explore the work of the negative at work in postmodern mysticism, in which the performing aspect of believing navigates between the void of abandonment and the figures of the religious space that it must create.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 101-116.

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Dominique Fessaguet : the mysticism of nothing

Food, temptation, body, animality and femininity represent Louise’s abjection. She has started a never-ending quest for the Nothing; nothing in her mouth, nothing in her body. She is following a mystical path: the Nothing that makes her go through a “ dark night ” like St. John of the Cross. Temptations and sins are tests of the soul for the mystic. Louise faces a similar fight against herself on her path to anorexia. How can the modalities of her scenario, wherein hallucinatory satisfaction denies her vital need, be understood ? The primary erogenous masochism, preserver of life, will become destructive masochism. Louise’s regression leads her to a linking/unlinking work and a drive diffusion. The prevalence of sight that comes from the pictogram has promoted access to the mystical path of the Nothing. The Nothing is her attempt to heal, which leads her to her death.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 89-99.

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Philippe Gutton : the mystical paradox

The mystical evolution of St. Theresa of Lisieux is examined using a model of the state of illusion (according to Winnicott’s approach). The latter, defined by its paradoxical quality – “ me-not me ”, “ living-dying ” – is fragile before the threat of a paradoxical injunction. Throughout her childhood, this threat was acted out by what Theresa, after her mother’s death, called “the moms”. She had a very eventful childhood which would turn mystical when, in adolescence, her illusion tutors were condensed into “ Jesus-moms ”. “ Conversion ” she calls it, a transference soon consolidated by her Carmelite vocation and her doctrine.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 65-88.

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Gérard Bonnet : mysticism and conversion in adolescence

The author approaches mystical experience using classical narratives such as Plato’s myth of the cave and Moses’ conversion to shed light on accounts that come to us from current psychoanalytical practice. He shows that mystical experience is an intense moment, wherein the subject experiences in a flash the sensation of attaining the ideal enjoyment that was madly imagined in childhood and plunges in with pleasure, without knowing exactly what is going on. This is also the moment when the flaws and the shadows of early experiences come back to him in a painful way, and when he is in danger of giving in body and soul, since these are so dissociable from the enjoyment in question, which lends itself to symptoms, to addictions, and to passages to the act which are under their rule. It is finally and above all the instant where he is obliged to assume responsibility for the conflicts that result, if he wishes to balance these exceptional experiences, whose hopes he bears in the deepest part of himself, and the reality in which he must invest himself today.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 41-63.

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Odile Falque : the mysticism of everyday life with etty hillesum

Mysticism : one can’t talk about it, and one can’t not talk about it. It consists of remaining in the illusion and the tension of paradoxes, particularly life-death, through a revisiting of the adolescent processes that Etty Hillseum situates at the onset of puberty. She returns to the originary, and it is a matter of getting out of this. This is what is at stake in her encounter with her psychologist, Julius Spier, an encounter that was, first of all, eroticized, in transgression, afterwards idealized and sublimated, in the discovery all at once the capacity to be alone, to think, to dream, to pray, for both seekers after God.
The mystical experience would be rooted in enjoyment, in transgression and in death.
“ The mysticism of everyday life ” may be spoken of in the psychical economy of the subject in movements of libidinal hyperinvestment, of disinvestment and of re-investment in the reality of daily life, which brings renewed energy, for the deepening and widening of psychical and spiritual space, caring for others, the mission that must be accomplished and the witness that must be given.
Such was the path of Etty Hillesum, a mystic who remain “ on the march ” towards death, survival, as recounted in her diaries An Interrupted Life, between 1941 and 1943, from Amsterdam to Auschwitz.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 23-39.

ENG - Mystique et experiences - 2008 T.26 n°1

Serge Lesourd : the relentless mystical passion of the adolescent

Le psychical phase of adolescence necessarily confronts the subject with the de-idealization of childhood gods, those that the child created for himself because of his fundamental dependence. Now, the postmodern social bond has changed the status of social gods, so that mystical adolescent passion is no longer a symbolic “ assumption ” of these, in the form of an interiorized ego ideal, but rather an “ incarnation ” in reality of the gods that sustain an ideal ego, in keeping with the divinisation of the human promoted by postmodern liberalization. The mystical passion of the adolescent thus takes the new forms attested to by current adolescent psychopathology.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 9-21.