The real is not merely the excess that invades or overwhelms us; it is also what is not perceived as not having been sufficiently given and which always eludes us. On the individual and collective scale, it takes the form of economic rationale and unrealistic positivism.
Art, as a falsification of the real, is a useful remedy, or even a rescue, in helping to ward off the prevailing economism that disenchants our reality by enabling a reinvention of oneself and the world. But it veers into absurdity and destructiveness if it does not remain tangential to the external and internal limits of the real. There can be only one indication for psychoanalysis today: disenchantment in the face of the real. It offers an adventure it offers to the subject who wishes to taste the vitality of truth and freedom, to be free to confront pain and surmount it in order not to be “really” afraid.
The tale “The Spectacles,” one of Edgar Allan Poe’s Extraordinary Tales, is a story of the “grotesque” showing us that if in adolescence one looks without seeing or sees without looking, the resolution of the enigmas of the sexual, of identity, of social development will be difficult because, like the hero at the outset, one will remain entangled in the net of Oedipal and incest issues. The adolescent gaze is above all “a language and it develops the proof.” (Jean Cocteau).
An engagement with the imaginary shapes this issue, prepared in cooperation with the Ferme du Vinatier and Professor Jacques Hochmann:
– expressions, internal and external theatrics, festive activities
– a defense of the adolescent imaginary, so often attacked by our modern society.
The avatar may be reduced to a sort of logo or enhanced with a large number of personal details. For its owner, it functions in virtual spaces as a second skin, and for its interlocutors as a set of partial objects. Neither totally real, nor totally imaginary, the avatar introduces him into a new space in which the interlocutor is both present and absent, in a way that can engage either the element of consolation or that of frustration.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 591-600.
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