Tragedy, which was born in Athens in the 5thcentury B.C., is characterized by its representation of reality’s problematic nature. In adolescence, the solving of sexuality’s enigma enables one to invest the idea that conflicting forces determine human behavior. By discovering the tragic dimension of existence, the adolescent can become aware of the perverse maneuvers that take us from the register of ambiguity to that of paradox and can commit an act of denunciation.
The author approaches mystical experience using classical narratives such as Plato’s myth of the cave and Moses’ conversion to shed light on accounts that come to us from current psychoanalytical practice. He shows that mystical experience is an intense moment, wherein the subject experiences in a flash the sensation of attaining the ideal enjoyment that was madly imagined in childhood and plunges in with pleasure, without knowing exactly what is going on. This is also the moment when the flaws and the shadows of early experiences come back to him in a painful way, and when he is in danger of giving in body and soul, since these are so dissociable from the enjoyment in question, which lends itself to symptoms, to addictions, and to passages to the act which are under their rule. It is finally and above all the instant where he is obliged to assume responsibility for the conflicts that result, if he wishes to balance these exceptional experiences, whose hopes he bears in the deepest part of himself, and the reality in which he must invest himself today.
The passage through adolescence itself raises the question of the act and its different dimensions, which we will approach from a clinical point of view in this article. If the act which separates the subject from the Other introduces a rupture, it also allows him to find a new symbolic position. In this article we wish to explore the dimensions of the act and its connection with anxiety, using the case of a young paranoiac subject who, with the help of analytical work, struggles not to be in the position of object to which he could be reduced by the risks associated with the dimension of the passage to the act.
In adolescence, the natural deposition of the imaginary father helps to rearrange Oedipal fixations and get beyond infantile sexuality. Here the author will try to show how difficult this is when the figure of the imaginary father corresponds with an idealized dead father. The therapy will then have to provide the adolescent with the possibility of elaborating the transference so that he can escape from the pervading presence of the imaginary father, a crucial step for the developing subject. Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 409-416.
It is standard practice to attribute the human acts of excessive violence that occur regularly in private and in public to an unleashing of aggressive drives : one speaks of the weakness of instances of the superego which have not fulfilled their role. Freud regularly refers to this schema, starting with his establishment of the second topic, and he is the inspiration behind most of the educational models now in force. However, the very ideals that are supposed to control drives can sometimes lead to violent passages to the act. In such cases, there is idealization without sublimation, and the ideal which is at the heart of the idealization is invested for its own sake. Instead of being the vector for desires, opening the way for sublimation, it bottles up drive energy and liberates it in an explosive way. This is why a deeper analysis of ideals is needed if one is to discover the components of the explosion and the way of dealing with it.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 897-915.
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