This article will show what is at stake in the case of an adolescent who confines himself and methodically constructs a place of voluntary reclusion, the place of an asceticism, to the point of becoming a figure of burial on the verge of in-terment anxiety. The text will attempt to provide not so much the description of an ascetic arc – its deprivations, seclusion, and attacks on the body – as of the place where it happens, the place of the asceticism, where the family home is undone and covered up by a new space.
Slam is a new poetic art form involving performance that has been taken up by young people. This poetry-performance responds to the need for narcissistic support and the conquest of new spaces in adolescence, when the field of language is invested as a breaking away from the mother tongue and the normative tongue. It enables young people to confront otherness by sublimating their aggressive drives through the common esthetic object they identify with and in which they exercise their creativity.
By means of a case study, the authors investigate the practice of high-level sports by young “slaves of glory”, who gain access to the position of demiurge through a disavowal of limits and a fantasy of omnipotence. When the reality of the body and of injuries comes rushing in, these champions start by asking for their “performance machine” to be restored, which gradually leads to an opening up of their inner world and to the emergence of complex pre-existing conflicts.
This paper suggets a new appproach of the problem of the psychological status of some kinds of epileptic fits in chidhood and adolecence as linked with some trauma tic situations, in terms of the traditional Freudian interpretation of Dostoievski and parricide. It is in terms of an incorporative defence of a melancholic nature that one may stress the strictly psychosomatic dimension of the fit. Such a fit enables a “ suject ” to surge (in fact, quite desubjecticized) possessed by the “ obscene and creul ” superego as mentioned by Lacan. Such a fit seems to be an impossible task of mourning,so long as in its drive like violence it “ recaptures ” the trauma’s libidinal loading by repeating it on a kind of “ infernal ” way (Freud). The thera peutic perspectives underlying such a paradoxical function of trauma go further beyong the clinical and theoretical dialogue open between Freud and Firenczi
In this article, the clinical treatment of the act is used to show how adolescent psychopathology attests to the state of the social bond in which the afflicted adolescents are growing up. Extreme psychopathologies are thus viewed as the success of the modern political bond, the free market liberalism which promotes self-fulfillment through performances that enact limitless enjoyment and the refusal of the human malady: castration.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 297-312.
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