Las intervenciones sobre la piel, son tentativas de reorganización de las fronteras entre dentro y fuera, un útil para avanzar en el paso delicado hacia la vida de hombre o de mujer. Peinado, piel (maquillaje, tatuaje, piercing, cirugía estética) o trajes. Cada joven este sobre informado sobre los looks posibles y la manera en que estos son percibidos por los otros. Las tentativas de control de la imagen de si como por ejemplo las escarificaciones es una voluntad de escaparse de una identidad intolerable.
Interventions involving the skin are attempts to redraw the boundaries between inside and outside; they act as a tool for getting through the delicate passage to manhood or womanhood. Hairstyle, skin (make-up, tattoos, piercings, cosmetic surgery) and clothes – every youngster is over-informed about possible looks and how other people will receive them. Such attempts to control one’s self-image or to alter it (through scarification, for example) express the adolescent’s wish to escape from an intolerable identity.
Les interventions sur la peau sont des tentatives de remaniement des frontières entre dehors et dedans, un outil de franchissement d’un passage délicat vers l’âge d’homme ou de femme. Coiffure, peau (maquillage, tatouages, piercings, chirurgie esthétique), ou vêtements, chaque jeune est surinformé sur les looks possibles et sur leur réception par les autres. Tentatives de contrôle de l’image de soi ou dans les scarifications par exemple, volonté d’échapper à une identité intolérable.
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.
Body tattooing and body piercing are gaining popularity among the young. This phenomenon intrigues and raises questions at the same time. If we put aside the wish to conform with peers that is characteristic of adolescents and young adults, what psychical reality drives them to repeat the practice of body marking over and over, along with the experience of physical pain it involves? Stemming from literature on psychosexual development, body marking and masochism, the position adopted in the present essay suggests that the physical pain associated with body tattooing and body piercing should be placed in the context of normative psychosexual development during adolescence rather than in the context of perversion. More specifically, the thesis developed in this essay proposes that the physical pain inherent to body marking practices is associated with the diffuse psychical pains of adolescence in an attempt to give them sense and to master them.
Peer culture is now replacing parent culture, transmission gives way to imitation. From now on one must measure up in the eyes of others, those of one’s age group, even if one must fight one’s parents in order to do this. One of the horrors of middle school and high school recess yards is to seen as the « buffoon » by failing to obtain the group’s approval, refusing a dare, or not displaying the right « brand » of clothes or shoes. Self esteem no longer comes from espousing the unanimous values that structure the social bond, it is no longer nourished in the mirror of elders or ancestors but in that of the peer group. The necessity for representation is found in both girls and boys, but not in the same manner.
La peau, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire, est un instrument de fabrique de l’identité, de manière ludique à travers tatouages ou piercings, ou de manière plus douloureuse à travers les scarifications. Par le sacrifice d’une parcelle de soi dans la douleur, le sang, l’individu s’efforce de sauver l’essentiel. En s’infligeant une douleur contrôlée, il lutte contre une souffrance infiniment plus lourde. Sauver la forêt implique d’en sacrifier une partie. De même pour continuer à vivre il faut parfois se faire mal afin de lutter contre la détresse.
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