If it is not possible for an adolescent to defend himself at the level of his ego by tolerating depression and if the ways of motor behavior are not open, the only thing left for the adolescent is the path of somatic unbinding which is a sign of experiences of de-subjectivation due to the intrusion of drive excitations into an immature ego. This is what happens with adolescents who are too well-behaved, too conformist, in whom the passage to the act is inhibited.
Archives par mot-clé : Body
Ignacio Melo : passages to the body
I suggest the hypothesis of one instance, the body, which would be situated between the somatic and the psyche. It would be a place of representation as well as a borderline concept, like the drive which lies in it. I think of it mainly as an instrument for generating figurability. Thanks to its articulation with the subconscious, it would contribute the transforming potential of somatic excitation. This potential, created within the narcissistic relationship with the primal object, undergoes considerable readjustments with the arrival of puberty.
Olivier Ouvry : orlan, carnal art
Orlan, carnal art, film of Stephan Oriach, depicts transformations in the artists own body. It is a discourse on art in place of that of science. The goal is to use technology to reduce the gap between what one is and what one has. The body is a tool for saying what one wants. It is a matter of subverting, in a dimension of transgrassion of criteria and social stereotypes, the notion of appearance in order to bring it down. The violence of this exhibition questions the place of the spectators who are invited to a live performance of this act.
Olivier Douville : attacks against the body, or return to the gesture
A clinical treatment of adolescent self-mutilation is possible as long as the adolescent is posited as being in a phenomenal crisis between two bodies. Not only between the child’s body and the adult body, but above all between the body of the partial drives and the phallicized body. The scene of the origins of the human body is psychically re-found and recreated at this moment. The author bets that a reading of the exchanges between Caillois and Bataille will give a glimpse of the adolescent tension in its subjectivation of the corporal.
Ignacio Melo : passages to the body II
In the face-to-face encounter between a teenager and a psychoanalyst, the body is not only a part of speech but also a palpable and immediate element offered up to the other’s gaze, a fortiori when there are tattoos, piercing, or self-mutilation. In such circumstances, remaining a psychoanalyst-subject entails a response that cannot be dissociated from the construction of a theory about the Body.
Irène Nigolian : Adolescence and the Psychosomatic
The theme of adolescence is approached in the light of classic psychosomatic theory, with some theoretical-clinical connections. Behavioral neuroses at this age seem to protect the soma, but paradoxically endanger the life of the subject, in symmetry with progressive diseases in the adult. Also, a deficiency in adolescent work has the potential to generate serious psychosomatic illnesses, either immediately or later on. The adolescent’s depression is the common denominator in most of these clinical situations; it entails a potential for object disinvestments and for the appearance of symptoms corresponding to essential depression as described by P. Marty. This paper questions the role of adolescence in the subject’s psychosomatic future.
Elsa Schmid-Kitsikis : Body and Psyche: Theorization
In light of what is called the clinical treatment of borderline states, the author investigates some notions inscribed within the relations between body and psyche, such as perception, the sensory, sensuality, representation, emotion, affect and auto-eroticism.
Particular importance is given to the place occupied by infantile sensuality in connection with the establishment of auto-eroticism, insofar as sensuality is most often confused with the sensory. These notions still represent a large part of the difficulties psychoanalytical research encounters today. They maintain a narrow relation with the drives’ sphere of influence, but the opposition that has often been asserted to exist between the sensorial-perceptive and the intellectual can no longer be defended.
Frédéric Lefevere, Thierry Rochet : between play and dream : balneotherapy as a psychotherapy for adolescents
Once considered a body instance, this instance is very often seen as being endangered by the pubescent process. Inversely, we wish to show how mediated therapies, and in particular balneotherapy, are especially relevant during adolescence, in helping to restore this instance, which, thanks to the psychotherapeutic process, can recover its status as a vector of figuration.
Noëlla Darcq, Miguel Gomez : the counter-transference faced with an exposed body
The bodily transformations associated with the psychical processes of the pubertaire lead adolescents within their group to latch onto fashions in clothing and ornament, in order to differentiate and individualize themselves. Among these fashions, youngsters are attracted to some more marginal movements, like the gothic style. These adolescents’ bodies then become a theater stage, where the play being enacted resonates with their own history, which is sometimes a traumatic one. Moreover, other youngsters make a spectacle of their own body, but the narration seems stuck, as though there were a disassociation between the body and the mind. In light of some clinical vignettes, the authors will attempt to develop the relations between the use of the body and the pubertaire dynamic of the process of individuation/separation within the problematic of the borderline personality: when thought is short-circuited, corporal expression is brought to the fore. But this kind of expression does not always elicit the same reaction in the clinician: he will be able – or not be able – to think, to associate, to induce a different transference relation. Lastly, these comments will as a whole make reference to some artistic works that have broached this subject, in particular Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Perrault’s Peau d’âne, and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.
Muriel Darmon : corporal variations. anorexia through the prism of sociologies of the body
By adopting the particular view offered by the sociology of the body, this article places anorexic attitudes and behaviors back into the social space of the body’s uses and representations. The study of « corporal variations » (according to periods of history, social classes, age groups and gender) allows us to see, behind the anorexic body, a corporal model situated historically and socially, one which is at once contemporary, female, and of middle or upper class origin. In addition, the process of corporal transformation that is in play throughout an anorexic career echoes contemporary representations of corporal malleability. It especially manifests two figures which are, however, opposites : that of a « soft » body, perceived as fluid and able to be modified at will, and that of a « hard » body, which tends to « persevere in its being », and resists all injunction to change.