This article, as an extension of D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the environment, analyzes in our hypermodernity the opposition between individual and collective expressions of the antisocial tendency, the two central aspects of which are busyness and the destruction of nature. We will thus show how the process of adolescent subjectivation requires one to survive a lost planet by creating free planets. An account of a clinical case will illustrate our ideas.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 187-198.
The concerns that today’s adolescents have about ecology is investigated in light of contemporary philosophical and sociological thinking about man’s dependence on the environment. Though denied by modern society, this is emphasized by psychoanalysis. It can also be understood at an intra-psychic level through the debt owed to one’s forbears and the guilt that has been handed down. Ecological activism could enable adolescents to reestablish bonds that have been interrupted, as part of a true “return to origins” from them.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 95-109.
Through the study of the cases of two deaf patients, this article will offer some thoughts on the subjectivation of the handicap in adolescence. This process seems to be closely tied to the ability of the patient’s environment to welcome his or her desire for autonomy and otherness, and to enable encounters with new love objects and with peers. This necessary pre-condition helps the patient to move from a body that may need rehabilitation to a desiring body and to integrate the handicap as part of his or her being and history.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 499-510.
If the child constructs his identity out of the bits of discourse about him that he picks up in the Wincottian environment, the adolescent attains a sexually-differentiated identity through a process we propose to call “ coat of arms ” : fragments of the body, eroticized by the play of partial drives would through this process be seen to be assembled into a whole constituting sexually-differentiated identity. The case of Akira, who captures bits of her friend’s body with her cell phone camera, enables us to investigate this coat-of-arms aspect of the construction of the sexually-differentiated identity of the subject, and even of the object, in adolescence.
Video games and educational computerprograms prove to be excellent supports for the clinical observation of behavior and of the man-machine relation. Children and video games inspire us to ask new questions about the transitional space they create. The virtual world is able to reveal how the subject interacts with his environment. What results from this are new hypotheses about the quality of perceptions and the apprehension of the object in the construction of the Ego and its emotional future.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 711-720.