Using studies of Schreber as a starting point, the author highlights one particular part of the paranoiac relation with the Other and others : « the other wants something from me » which is the structural model of human relations in the current civilisation driven by liberalism. This paranoiac relationship with our fellow-men builds a manner of relating to the act which offers total realisation of enjoyment, restricted only by impotence. The subject then finds himself inscribed in a relation with fellow-men which is made of violence, faced with the hindrances that everyday life in society imposes on thrill-seeking. The human relations turn into violence against the persecutory fellow-men. Teenagers, more than anyone else, bear witness to this new kind of social bond.
This article tries to make a distinction between paranoid elements in adolescence and authentic paranoia. It opposes diffraction and projection in order to differentiate the paranoid elements from paranoiac psychosis. It shows how the physical indexes of sexual maturity infer a return of the « originary » and a new interpretation of the primal bonds. According to this interpretation by the psychic environment, the teenager can build new demarcations between intrapsychic, intersubjective, intimacy and otherness. These interpretations enable the teenager to conquer a new intimacy through the bond of incompatibility
Paranoiac thinking and functioning have a certain specificity within the process of adolescence. It would be an ordinary or pathological limit imposed upon their creativity, a limit inscribed in the pubertary pictogramme which is carried out not with the Other but against the Other. The basis upon which adolescent creation is carried out is the pubertary state of illusion in the Winnicottian sense in which the « Infantile Ego » and the « pubertary non-yet-an-ego » are in a paradoxical relation. Paranoia would be the effect of a paradoxical injunction coming from the subject and from his environment, attacking the fundamental state of illusion. Starting from this thesis, the features of adolescent paranoia are considered: causalist thinking, the pairing of disavowal-projection, the accusation of the genital body.
The last chapter seeks out possible corollaries of this thesis for adolescent treatment, in order to get around the obstacle of paranoia: working as much as possible in the register of associative thought, refusal of the inside-outside opposition in favour of a mutual relation in the session, which is treated as an observatory for external events regularly recounted by the adolescent, the importance of counter-transference in provoking positive transference.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 571-596.
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