Using a clinical account of the treatment through psychodrama of an adolescent girl hospitalized for anorexia, the author will discuss different aspects of the way violence is summoned up against the one bearing the anorexic symptom. There is the violence of plunging into a treatment framework that compels the patient into renewed interaction with the object, and the healthy violence of the child within the adolescent who supports the turning around of hatred from auto-aggression to other-directed aggression.
The author, using a particular kind of recourse to ideology, recalls the importance of the process of re-investment in adolescence and investigates the specific dynamic it maintains in the subject, between binding and unbinding. This approach aims to highlight the issues of the responder function and the risks to the adolescent when this responder is missing or cannot meet the challenges of the process of subjectivation.
In the first part of his paper, which is a historico-critical one, the author shows the function of the invention of a death drive in the course of the evolution of the Freudian thought. The death drive corresponds to finding to a new balance within the heart of the sexual theory, whereas it is wrongly considerd as being an external addition to the latter.In the second part of the paper , which is a metapsychological one, the author locates the daeth drive within the genesis of the psychical apparatus as being one of the consequences of primary repressin as id componnt. The opposition between life sexual drives and death sexual drives corresponds to the fundamental polarity between binding and unbinding. In the third part, the author attemps to delineate a general psychological theory of hate starting from three factors : self-preservative aggressiveness or fighting spirit, sadistic violence of the death sexual drive, and the narcissistic specular enjoyment.
More and more adolescents on the threshold of puberty engage in morbid attacks on their own body, particularly in the form of scarification and burns. Clinical work with these patients shows how serious the disorders are. All these patients have a history of confirmed sexual violence. Most bear the stigma of some real childhood trauma. The others are damaged by potentially incestuous interrelationships that have been woven within the family. The emergence of the experiences of puberty have cataclysmic effects on the psyche. The body begins to stir and seizes power as the privileged locus of expression, for an attempt at figuring, through the act, a psychical issue that cannot yet be elaborated.
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