In the aftermath of a seventeen year war covering the south aestern part of south Africa, Mozambique’s civil war victims count up to about one million of the fifteen million whole population ; a third of the inhabitants have suffered displacement. The madness of war includes that of thousands of children and youths drafted as servants and soldiers either willingly or forced to. They have been beaten to be forced to fight, being treatened of death, they have either been tortured or have themselves tortured others. Most of them have been drafted during their childhood, so they have become adults or adolescents during the war period.
Understanding this spécific population’s psyche implies using complexe compréhensive méthods ; the character features of général and psychodynamic range are related to child-victim clinical practice, as well as that of authors of extreme violence ; the ethno-psychiatric dimension being the model of other more specific issues related to local particularities. Cultur and the fundamental pact which links men between themselves are both, through these situations, rudely attecked, and this is prejudicial for the future.
Archives par mot-clé : Identification
François Pommier: from parental passion to nascent homosexuality
The comparison of clinical situations of two men having relations of a homosexual type in adolescence leads one to comprehend nascent homosexuality in relation to the disarray of the adolescent confronted with the language of parental passion. It results from this study, that if the homosexual act in adolescense consists of seeking another self mirrored outside the self, it is essentially as a function of the image of the parents merged into one that constitutes this act. The homosexual relationship in adolescence might not be built so much on following a process of similarity, as in organizing itself around a confrontation with another, different from himself and essentially enigmatic.
Christian Seulin: modifications of the phallic symbol in adolescence
The adolescent subject is confronted with the integration of his genital sexual identity and his future adulthood among other adults. These changes do not occur without reorganization of the phallic symbol, sign of narcissistic completness with the corporal supports referring to the total body and the penis. At the same time as the evolution of the phallic symbol, a revision of the ideals which are associated with it, are being reworked. The difficulties encountered are accompanied by defensive movements, homoerotic in particular, liable to be fixated. The models of identification offered to the young subject by adults have an important influence on his future.
Catherine Desprats-Péquignot : from a hole in the throat to imaginary sex organs
The associative speech of a subject in relationship with an interlocutor sometimes gives rise to the classic sex/face equivalence, giving a clinical understanding of the substitutive correspondences between « low » and « high », but also of what this will come to mean for a subject, which is proper to him and unknown to him. Thus the case of Anaïs invites us to consider the correspondences among throat, gaze, eye, female genitalia, all condensed into the generic image of the « hole », in a case where the experience of a tracheotomy offers a fitting support for the expression of her psychical reality and her subjective positions.
Thomas Gaon : video games, the future of an illusion
The technology of the virtual produces an area of illusion that is more and more captivating and engaging for adolescents faced with a reality that is sometimes experienced with anxiety. Video games are the royal road into this parallel domain, particularly through its implications for creativity, sublimation and identity. They play out the fantasy in an interactive form that combines activity and passivity. In adolescence, the incarnation of the heroes of video games based on the infantile heroic identification in its narcissistic dimension (ideal ego) would help to compensate for the loss of parental objects. But, the positive and subjectivating contribution of virtual identity depends on the permeability of this ludic sphere. The richness of the exchange between internal and external realities within this transitional area hinges on the real and reflexive presence of the other, so that the circuit of instances in play can be operative.
David le Breton : the skin’s depth
The skin is, for better or worse, an instrument for constructing identity, playfully, through tattoos or piercing, or more painfully, through scarification. By painfully sacrificing a part of oneself, blood, the individual strives to save what is essential. By inflicting a controlled pain on himself, he fights against suffering that is infinitely worse. In order to save the forest, it is necessary to sacrifice one part of it. In the same way, if one is to get on with one’s life, one must sometimes hurt oneself as a way of combating distress.
Pascal Hachet : The Perspective of an Adolescent Reader on a Literary Text Written by Another Adolescent
The specific case of teen literary writing is a rich medium for the identification of teenage readers. Teenage writers who have continued and broadened their writing gifts in adulthood provide a constructive identification based on a successful subjectivation of the puberty process, while those who wrote only during their teens arouse a strong fascination in young readers who are inclined to deny the reality of the puberty process. Sticking by such a writer or his writings can be the sign of an effective or possibly bad mental outcome of adolescent crisis. The case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Jean-Marie, who was very fond of Rimbaud’s life and poems, is a good example of this problematic issue.
Catherine Chabert : The Past : A Passive Form ?
Using clinical fragments and meta-psychological reflections, the author advances some working hypotheses which tend to show how, in adolescence, compulsive symptomatologies aim to stop time by means of a major counter-investment of passivity. By actively refusing the effects of absence and of loss on the one hand, and those of the castration inherent to indentificatory processes on the other hand, these adolescents attempt to annul the passage of time and the changes it bears witness to.
Férodja Hocini : identification, friendship and transference**
The author seeks to study the links between friendship and process of identification at the time of childhood and adolescence. As she retraces the treatment of one of her female teenager patient in psychotherapy, the author tells the story of a really singular friendship between two girls, two soul sisters that only death could tear apart. The analysis of the transfero-counter-transferential movements leads on one hand to release the therapist from the process of idealization in which her patient tends to enclose her. On the other hand and above all, it leads to the transforming of the therapeutic relation, which is at risk of getting lost in a confused unity.
Emmanuel Diet : critical perspectives on adolescence, school acculturation and hypermodern politics
In the context of neo-liberalism and the collapse of social meta-frameworks, the disavowal of generational difference provokes a crisis in cultural transmission at school by avoiding the conflictual nature of Oedipal conflicts and attacking psychical and cultural organizers. Adolescent suffering, violence and transgression should be understood as symptoms and consequences of the political idealization of perversion and of regression to the infantile in the socio-historical situation.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 431-445.