Returning with D. W. Winnicott and J. Lacan to the question of adolescence as a social as well as subjective phenomenon, this paper seeks to identify what is at stake during this period, namely a new articulation of jouissance and the body based on the three figures of “the paternal metaphor”, that is to say from the Oedipal scenario.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2,251-260.
Helping young autists with new corporal feelings and their fluctuations during the passage through puberty opens up new ways of calming when there is impingement by the drives. The pubertary passage which gives rise to a sensory awakening in the lower body can also help to restart the construction of an unfinished corporal ego and subsequently make the autistic youth more likely to be spontaneously interested in the relation with other people.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 4, 821-833.
Using the individual psychotherapeutic treatment of a thirteen year-old patient, Clementine<i></i>, we will explore the possible repercussions of a sisterly bond that is too strong, and how it may sometimes prove a hindrance to the separation/individuation process. Carried to an extreme in the fantasy of twinship, it leads to an Ego with vague contours, and the pursuit of a relation that may be harmful to a subject with fragile narcissism. There is lack of differentiation between bodies and psyches. Anorexia will burst this specular bubble when only one of the subjects reaches physiological puberty. Clinical interviews in the space for physical and psychic separation the hospital setting provides shed light on the issues and the limits of the establishment of subjectivation work.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 27-36.
Adolescence, a recent category peculiar to the West, tends to disunite puberty as a universal physiological event. It is not so much the disappearance of rites that is in play here, as the extenuation of the bond of solidarity between the phenomenon of puberty and the social designation – and treatment – of adolescence. Using the example of self-harming practices in adolescence, I would like to hypothesize an increase in acts/symptoms is fed by this separation and tends, paradoxically, to reduce it – i.e., reassert a social and private recognition of identity of the forms of otherness engaged by puberty – and at the same reject these same forms of otherness.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 47-56.
»Adolescence is a privileged time for the revelation of perverse organisation. We propose to illustrate it using the Memoirs of the Abbot de Choisy dressed as a woman « (1687-1695), that J. Lacan invited us to read. Articulated with the maternal imaginary, the transvestite practice of Choisy attests to a denial of castration and to the identification of the subject to the phallus. Through the maintenance of a phallicisation of the penis, where the fetish dominates, the puberty innovation is disavowed and the Female is not illustrated. For him, a fetishistic strategy was the only answer to the his mother’s death.»
»The body of fate and the fate of the body are important issues during adolescence, which discloses the fate « of the absolute, unique and fundamental inheritance passed on to the adolescent by his parents. In this sense, there exists, to our mind, an intergenerational aftereffect of the traumatic, which is defined by the excess of the « too much « and the « not enough «. In this way, the « bad « is introduced and transmitted in the psychological life of the child, who during adolescence feels encumbered by the « corporeal « history of his parents. Also, beyond the onslaught of drives experienced during adolescence, the body, at this stage of development, reveals a sort of « original flaw «. This is why the young subject cannot manage to rid himself of the « body problem «, which brings into play seduction and sexuality and is, finally, the « problem « of the body.»
»The notion of transitory perversion was used fifty years ago about an adolescent in an article by R. Lebovici that was commented upon and discussed by J. Lacan in his seminar and in his Écrits. The author shows how this notion got lost in the meandering discussions about adult perversion that arose afterwards. However, it is particularly useful now, when there is a tendency to prejudge a subject’s future on the basis of his childhood or adolescent behaviour. We can see that it attests to difficulties in making certain messages prevail over sexual expression in the proper sense, and is a prerequisite for sexual identification. Qualifying the perversion as transitory « is enough to signify that it is not a perversions in the same sense as in the adult, though it nevertheless has much to teach us about adult perversion.»
The study of the intermediary states or physiological determinants of a liability to emotional behaviour at adolescence necessarily calls forth the psychology of development and endocrinology of behaviours. If one holds on to hormon biology, and sex hormons in particular, both levels of significant effects may be summed up in an activating influence, contemporary to puberty and a far prior organizing influence, contemporary to the ante- and peri-natal period. According to both these levels of influence, one should be able to distinguish between the direct and indirect effects, knowing that all of them are at work simultaneously, in proportions that are of course diverse and often very difficult to precise. The data we have at present suggest that we should relativize a far too simplistic image of a » hormonal storm » wherefrom an emotional » storm and stress » specific to adolescence would result. These data stress important differences according to the sex and also stress the joint part played by the several factors coming from the environment.
This paper shows how the theme of Aids is tackled and used by those youths who call Fil SantÈ Jeunes (a free help line). Aids appears there no longer as a displacement pattern but as a true illness we should make out among others the ordinary fantasmatic productions linked to the puberty problematics and the pathological discourse of young adults. Even in calls for fun, the listener must take into account the reality of the epidemics and should take car of prevention
In order to answer such a question, the author wishes to ponder over the evolution of the specificities of both children and adolescents in the past fifteen years in the Western countries and in France in particular. She concludes in stressing a progressive wiping out of the several specificities of the latency period, of puberty and of the second period of adolescence. Such a conclusion is loaded with consequences since it questions in a totally new approach the whole erection of repression and biphasism of post-Oedipian identifications as they were described by Freud.
From the point of view of the present training of the psychoanalyst roughly speaking, she suggests that the pattern of child psychoanalysis should remain the princeps pattern, thus being followed by adolescent psychoanalysis without opposing the one to the other in any other way but the very psychological structures of the subjects to which such patterns are meant to refer.