The article addresses the way that adolescents imagine the future with regard to the present, and take ownership of the present time through contemporary environmental problems. By means of two clinical vignettes, the authors will attempt to show how adolescents apprehend the end of the world: planet and institution are brought together. What capacities do adolescents have to project themselves into the future, based on the things that have been handed down to them and their ability to transform these things?
This article suggests a spatio-temporal reading of the weight contract in the treatment of hospitalized anorexic patients. The weight contract may be conceived of as a form of therapeutic mediation with a temporal aim. To the spatial boundaries of the treatment site combine with the temporal boundaries of one’s weight at the time of separation and at the time of discharge. The relation between the two produces a “weight time” which will echo the patient’s psychic movements towards his parental objects.
Using clinical encounters with contemporary artists (in this case, Boris), we explore the place of the body in creation, through the notion of rhythm. Rhythm is not limited to rhythmicity or tempo, nor measure alone; rather, it bears witness to the incarnation of internal movement. It is in its incarnation that rhythm exists, in time with the body of the drives that it expresses. The created work will be its echo.
This article will try to pinpoint the conditions leading to the emergence of Islamic fanaticism in Europe. The fascination Islamism exerts over the Old World here designates both the attraction to jihad and intellectual blindness in the face of the phenomenon. This symptom of contemporary life will be interpreted in light of the effects of “historical truth” caused in the people involved, while the issues this presents for the work of human culture will be explored.
Idealization is considered to be among the three components of human love : « excitation, idealization, affection ». This contextualization helps us to understand better the complex and contradictory issues of the ideal. Hope is also tied to love. In descriptive terms, hope places in the future the object of love and primary satisfaction lost forever in the past. In this forward, progradient movement it seems possible to find it again in a vanishing point that recedes eternally, always out of reach. According to Freud, hope is « the hope of hallucinatory reunion with the lost object of satisfaction ». Following Freud, the author proposes a phenomenology and a metapsychology of Hope, which entails a theory of the hallucinatory, raising it to the level of a concept. A clinical example links ideal and hope: hope is born from the diminution of an idolatrous idealization. This disappearance of the hope of loving and being loved leads to despair and, in the end, death.
The paper describes the cure of an adolescent who had been formerly an austistic child suffering from time anxiety, using video as “ symbolizing mediation ” in a day hospital. The author streses quite a few clinical conditions enabling that very adolescent to leave behind a state of chaos and timeless psychotic excitment. The analysis of the psychological impac of video as a technical apparatus enables one to undesrtand that a cathexis in some mastery fixes a nd controls time, whereas the hallucinatory presentifies it again and defers it for a brief moment of eternity. By building some specific containing therapeutic position, the author allows the adolescent to find a new orientation for tme which he can modulate in term of drives then enabling him to create a vital minimum of time continumm. A final clinical sequence shows the passage from a state of anxiety in terms of panic urge, within the tims of separatin, towards the possibility to think with serenity that there may be a time for reunion. From all these observations, the author stresses a few stanpots for a psychoanalytic theory of the severeal times at work in thought processes.
The investment of time by adolescents in therapy calls into question our model of adolescence and its time frame as if it were for the therapist to answer these questions. At the extreme, some adolescents would come to therapy to go through their « adolescent crisis » ; should psychological immaturity be cured, and in what setting ? These questions are probably related to the psychological culture inspiring models of adolescence.
When the family or school structure sets the time frame of adolescence according to models dating back to the beginning of the century, the therapist will work with these reference points and try to interpret their psychical value. But when social structure becomes uncertain or absent, the clinical setting may become the only source of limits for the time transition between childhood and adulthood; in order to avoid the stalemate of endless therapies or educational work, the therapist will be confronted with the difficult task of inviting the adolescent, just out of childhood, to interiorize the limits of the setting into psychical limits between the child and the adult. The weakening of cultural models would therefore would therefore put a higher burden on the psychical work of adolescence.
By exhibiting his locomotive trail, the graffiti artist invents a city for himself where his identity fantasies unfurl; thanks to these, he hopes to integrate his relation with others by making himself the object of his own practice. Then the street is no longer divided up into “ territories ”, but into moments of history, pieces of time, allowing the singularities that are being tried out to veer towards what is calling from outside. Not a production of works but of what is at work in it, the street sprayed with graffiti exudes the excesses and uncertainties of adolescence by inserting into actuality the figures of an archaistic drive that can be sublimated.
In 1999, David Fincher directed the feature film Fight Club, which is often regarded as a film against capitalist society. But beyond that, this film is a striking example of risky adolescent behaviour that can be interpreted anthropologically and psychologically. In many ways, the dialogue between characters is similar to the language used among teenagers today. In addition, we can see that the framework and dialogue of the film allude to the different concepts observed in the theory of risky adolescent behaviour. This point of view allows us to take another look at Fincher’s film in order to understand why it became a true cult film for a young generation. Furthermore, we will see that an interpretation of risky adolescent behaviour can be further strengthened by an analysis of temporality…
The Emergency Room is the healthcare service most used by youths. Two principle phenomena bring them in: accidents and somatic manifestations. These have one factor in common : a body that is both agent and victim of adolescent disorders and acts. Using research conducted in five hospitals in Rome between 2000 and 2002, most notably at San Eugenio Emergency Services, we offer some thoughts on the clinical value and the evolving function of the onetime clinical encounter (meeting « just once »). Taking into account the different time schemes at play in this sort of meeting space – like crisis situations or the element of surprise – we will see how the Emergency Room interview can provide an opportunity for « creative risk » for a time, a long time within an instant, but also for a new perspective on the event the adolescent has experienced, if we can be receptive to his paralyzed time scheme and allow him to appropriate our own life history.
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