This article recounts individual psychotherapeutic work undertaken with a deaf adolescent, in the specialized institution where he was received, and shows to what extent adolescence can be a violently disorganizing crisis, but also a time when new resources can be mobilized. Separated from his family since the age of four years and ten months on account of his handicap, his entry into puberty brings the issue of this estrangement to the forefront. At this moment, Amadou evokes different versions of the separation, genuine « scènes pubertaires (pubertary scenes) » (Gutton, 1991) in which the childhood event is made present, the violence of this event linking it to the violence of puberty. The crisis he goes through is an opportunity to elaborate the childhood trauma, to find and investigate supports offered by his environment – psychotherapy, the institution, and the family. This case study helps us to reflect more generally upon the Oedipal issues of separation, the visit from his parents at the acme of his crisis having enabled him to get more involved in an adolescens process (Gutton, 1996). This work also provides an opportunity to study the work of anthropologists and psychoanalysts (Emy, 1972, 1988 ; Ortigues, 1966) whose work sheds precious light on the child’s separation from the mother and the family, and on the specific characteristics of the organization of the Oedipus complex in an African milieu.
Archives par mot-clé : Pubertary
Bernard Brusset: from the maturation of the instinct according to Pierre Male to the pubertary according to Philippe Gutton
From Pierre Male to Philippe Gutton, the specific nature of the work of adolescence has been affirmed, producing great developments in contemporary perspectives of psychoanalysis, not without some effect on the latter. Metapsychological renewals have been set up to give an account of the diversity of the clinical treatment of adolescence. This is always primarily a matter of the young adolescent’s confrontation with the pubertary genital. The traumatic effect of this emergence, in an initial break with the latency period and with the phallic narcissistic infantile genital organization, determines modes of defense which may be of an archaic type in relation with primary flaws in the psychical organization. The impact of puberty reveals these by re-actualizing them, and adolescence as a psychical work determines their outcome. The psychotherapy of adolescence retains the essential part of the psychoanalytical method, association of ideas, but this is fed by the therapist in order to foster a putting into representation and into words. The analyst’s psychical availability and plasticity of identification helps him to find, in his own style, the right tone and the proper distance.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 217-234.
Philippe Givre : Michael Jackson : raw fantasies
Michael Jackson’s life was akin to a long one man show that ended when he was barely fifty years old. What did the adolescence of the star represent, for himself first of all ? Indeed, the physical transformations of puberty will for him generate massive anxieties, causing virulent and repeated attacks against his own body, finally leading to a genuine destruction of his physical appearance. His inability to accept these inherent elements of puberty were nevertheless counterbalanced by the sublimatory value of his artistic creativity. Thus the moonwalk, the artist’s true signature, an acted and performed expression, may be the translation of fantasy scenario closely tied to the trauma of puberty and maternal castration. Recourse to a phenomenon of « extimization » of internal reality could thus have manage to produce a sublimated actualization of fantasies transformed in the fire of his esthetic creation.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 1005-1030.
Philippe Gutton : the adult human other for adolescence
The adult human other takes up the conceptualization hitherto worked on as « the parental subject of the transference ». His humanity is an expression of his willingness to participate in the pubertary processes during sublimation. This other represents the adult-ness that shows the control of the second topic and can thus support interpretation by the infantile « already-there » of the innovating pubertary as well as adolescent subjectal creation. The closeness of the bond is not without risk.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 949-964.
Véronique Donard, Eric Simar : video gods. of the adolescent spiritual dimension in video games
RPG and MMORPG-type video games offer adolescents the opportunity to redynamize their belief processes, which have been blocked by archaic conflicts reactivated in puberty. They seem to help soothe the depressive affect proper to the pubertary through an manic investment of the virtual universe ; this enables the adolescent to invent a grandiose self, and to work at reconstructing a self that is grieving for childhood.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 815-821.
Dominique Reniers, Serge Lesourd : originary fantasies and adolescent re-veiling
The concept of originary fantasy was not really theoretically developed in Freud’s work. However, these originary fantasies hold considerable interest insofar as they are an instance of the original real. Analytical literature shows that they are often confused with childhood sexual theories. Here it is a matter of grasping the particular value in what, in adolescence, is marked by the reactualization of a primordial enjoyment, that of the flesh which is outside of phallic law. Such an analysis leads to an investigation of adolescent hystericization in the two paths of sexual differentiation founded by it, which are supported precisely by an originary fantasmatic dimension oriented towards the containment for the girl, and towards the protest against the Other’s demand in the boy.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 819-841.
Olivier Ouvry, Eric Bidaud : dysmorphophobia, pubertary process and adolescent process
Dysmorphophobic fears refer to apprehensions about what a position sexually differentiated as either masculine or feminine can evoke regarding a commitment that cannot be maintained in others’ eyes. Starting with the conviction that a shameful negativity is contained within an imaginary hole in the body, the adolescent boy or girl feels excluded from social interplay and from all registers of seduction, and takes refuge in this outcast condition, thus « taking a vacation » from the trials of sexual difference. Also, the whole problematic of veiling situates the adolescent towards what we could call his « re-visagification », a necessary response to his questioning within the field of the exchange of gazes.
In this article, we will define a path which may be traced along a circle whose two ends do not come together, but which form an ascending spiral: the starting point is the real of the body, the initial evidence of the pubertary process, experiences as the Other sex (the Feminine), then the experience of shame, of dysmorphophobia, and of the creation of the aesthetic object for covering up that experience of emptiness.
revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 801-818.