The issue of hate and adolescence is viewed as a play of mirrors: on the one hand, there the hate that the adolescent can feel and which may be hatred of the other or self-hatred; on the other hand, the hate that may be directed at the adolescent, hatred of adolescents.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 289-299.
As far as adult patterns, the stress may be laid on two different aspects, even if they are, most of the time, linked. Some are actively and personally present in us as was the case with the school teacher who changed radically albert camus’ destiny (and in that very case, what was at stake was how to know how to keep one’s place). But they are also patterns which, without directly interfering with our lives, become such by precisely knowing how they should keep their place. In order to illustrate those aspects of things, we chose two episodes in moses’ life : the former when he is given his adult place from jethro, his father-in-law and the latter when he himself becomes the « relation pattern » for his own people in the course of the crossing the desert, by submitting himself to the law of exchange.
Becoming an adult forces the confrontation to the second time of the oedipian conflict within a sequence implying some distance with the first love or hate objects. The outcome of the access to the adult stage and to the processes of sublimation depend on the quality of the psychological work over the links with the objects all along the stages going from latency to post-adolescence. A research on the elaboration of the depressive position at adolescence, starting from the rorschach and tat tests, shows that such an elaboration becomes possible only after adolescence as such.
The treatment of so-called adult subjects is often punctuated with references to a period of time which they call their adolescence. We shall start from a postulate: the moment of adolescence could be defined as the time when the child fantasy is recast. The psychical work of the becoming-adult could then be grasped as the moment when this refashioned construction can be examined. The solidity of this construction could then be put to the test, or else its faults could be fathomed so as to attempt a new construction. We shall endeavour to illustrate this through various clinical cases.