Archives par mot-clé : Relation to the ego

Philippe Givre : philia and adolescence

The central issue of this text is to see whether the thematic of Philia may be relevant in some way to the psychoanalytical approach. Psychoanalysis’ affinities with Eros do not argue in favour of this, unless we take into account conceptualizations of Winnicott, who links friendship with the notions of “ relation to the ego ” and the “ capacity for being alone ”. From this one gathers that the gift of friendship would be involved in the process of affective maturation, whose most elaborated phenomenon is the capacity for being alone in the presence of the other. The friend cannot be viewed as a mere model or as the equivalent of a self-portrait. Neither can he be reduced to another oneself, though he holds something that is due to me. If teenagers have a preference for friendship, it is because the gift of friendship is indispensable for them in the starting and accompanying the movements of subjectivation of the adolescens. In this sense, all friendship is contemporary with a subjective rearrangement since it conditions the possibility of emerging as what is proper to ourselves.