Tomando apoyo sobre la clínica del acto en este artículo, se tratara de demostrar como es que la sicopatología adolescente nos atestigua del estado del vínculo social en el cual crecen los adolescentes en sufrimiento. Las psicopatológicas extremas, serán así propuestas como el logro de un vínculo político moderno. El liberalismo que prona la realización de si a través el valor de la performancia, la jubilación sin límite y el rechazo de la enfermedad humana: la castración.
Starting from the taking care of an undefinable young adolescent girl as seen in an emergency ward, the author develops a new reading of primary narcissistic disorders resting on the vicissitudes of the subject’s trying to erect some decent psychological mother image. Hence both bodies act as » container » within the relationship leading the subject, when confronted to forbiddings, to react in terms of actings rather than of words. The handling of such adolescents compels one to reconstruct, within transference, an introjected mother image hence turning the archaÔc body into a body caught within the language and its signifiers.
Aids is inscribed as a return of death within sexuality after the dazzling blaze of total enjoyment in the years of » sexual liberation « . It stresses the passage to adolescent genital sexuality of a hue which is quite different and yet quite similar to Freud’s cases of adolescents and Dora’s in particular. Such a return of death within the genital sexual accounts for the new sexual behaviours of adolescents (faithfulness, baby-couples, collective rapes) but also comes to be part and parcel of every adult cure, since the relationship towards the adult and towards love are now different, turning Aids into a real object of fantasy.
From their work with an adolescent caught up in the violence of inter-ethnic strife, who became a warrior at the age of ten after his family was murdered by the other clan, the authors examine the enactment in reality of the murder of the father and its effects on the subject’s place within the social bond, leading in to the issues raised by the violence of today’s youths as a “ real-ization ” of the murder of the father.
In this article using a case study of female homosexuality, the author shows how adolescent homosexuality, especially female homosexuality which has puzzled psychoanalysis, can be understood as one of the normal paths leading to the encounter of bodily pleasure during the sexual act in the pubertal period. That leads one to ask questions about the effects of social discourse on the adolescent passage, and consequently on the place granted, in modern and post modern times to acted upon homosexuality and not sublimated homosexuality that Freud wrote about, as one of the possible forms of the social bond.
Distinguishing first the different forms of urban space (streets, alleys, etc.) according to their historical and current uses, and then the different experience of public space at different times of life (childhood and adulthood), the author posits the hypothesis that our modern urbanism no longer enables the adolescent to make the passage between a child’s experience of the street (characterized by inner reverie) and an adult experience (characterized by differentiation and naming). Adolescents then try to replay the this passage between private and public, but find no response in the anonymized places of modernity, except that of stigmatization in answer to a frantic quest for recognition.
Using their work with an adolescent girl who scarifies herself, the authors suggest that passages to the act involving the body be read as an attempt, differentiated by practice, to construct an object of desire. The scarifications carry out this operation by means of cutting, while piercing sustains it through drive excitation, which translates a differentiated relation between the subject and the Other.
The support of an Œdipal father appears to be a strongly present factor in the actual treatment of the adult and the adolescent. The author analyzes this relationship with the father as refusal of the pubertaire passage, which necessitates the bringing down of the father in order to make better use of him in one’s adult relations with enjoyment and pleasure. The present social bond which makes the father and his decline the center of the « transformation » of the world thus constructs an impasse for the subject in his passage towards adult life.
Based on the results of an adolescent girl’s treatment, the author discusses a major discovery made at the time of adolescence, i.e. the discovery of femininity as such, unknown until then to the subject, whether boy or girl. This “ femininity as such ” is construed by the subject as separate from the sexual being he considered himself as a child. Sexuality rests on phallic primacy which limits relations with others. At puberty, the adolescent will refuse this phallic primacy as a regulating agent of ifs relationship with the outside world, as a limit to sexuality, as a boundary to enjoyment. This “ beyond ” of the phallic dimension, femininity as such, which is a type of enjoyment not fully marked by the phallic limit, must pass through unconscious logic, to allow the emergence of an heterosexual love relationship. The encounter with THE difference, one which embodies all differences, is difficult for adolescents. This detour through femininity, which is a necessary disruption, can also be the cause of serious social and psychic disruptions in adolescents.
Le psychical phase of adolescence necessarily confronts the subject with the de-idealization of childhood gods, those that the child created for himself because of his fundamental dependence. Now, the postmodern social bond has changed the status of social gods, so that mystical adolescent passion is no longer a symbolic “ assumption ” of these, in the form of an interiorized ego ideal, but rather an “ incarnation ” in reality of the gods that sustain an ideal ego, in keeping with the divinisation of the human promoted by postmodern liberalization. The mystical passion of the adolescent thus takes the new forms attested to by current adolescent psychopathology.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 9-21.
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