Using two very different clinical cases, this article offers an anthropological exploration of contemporary conceptions of youth. These conceptions are linked to the opening up of places of confinement and to the promotion of individual autonomy. They are unevenly distributed according to social milieu and gender. Faced with threats to the environment, the tendency of individual capacities to double down on the consumption of resources and on the culture/nature dualism is becoming a problem.
Referring to our psycho-sociological research and to several years of reflexive interviews with adolescents, I analyze the way in which the housing project, a space for daily living and belonging, constitutes both a place of refuge and a risk of fixation. In the face of stigma, the adolescent peer group welcomes and protects; it also represents a place of confinement, both in the psychical sense and the sense of material survival. Getting out of the projects requires important steps made up of failures and successes. All leave this adolescent situation, the paths are many, and the recourse to Islam is more and more one of the ways.
In this article, we aim to resist representations of youth as effect or victim, by creating new potential supposed to both listen to the adolescent in his singularity as a subject and to analyze what he represents as a socio-political issue for society. This objective pre-supposes new exchanges and new cooperation not only between technician-participants, but within society as a whole.
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.
In the contemporary context, characterized among others by the shortage of roads drawn towards the empowerment, teenagers compete in originality to advance in any harmony with their society of consumption and image. Now, in spite of their absence of resistance, the imperative of assertion forces them to invest certain dimensions of the existence to be protected from the feeling of heteronomy. By investing the temporality, in particular by devoting to acts of desynchronization, by creating deliberately emergency situations and by provoking symbolic experiences of the ubiquity, young people redefine their reports in the temporal constraints which impose the rhythms of the collective life. The temporality appears then as a material of the autonomy.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 161-169.
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