The increasing number of requests for the institutional management of adolescents indicates either that adolescent crises have become more severe, or that the present forms of family organization render these families incompetent to manage the adolescents by themselves. This demand may be explained in part by the lack of procedures marking the passage to adulthood. Much adolescent behavior, in fact, re-enacts failed attempts at initiation rites. Work with adolescents can only be enriched and improved by knowledge of rites of passage practiced by traditional societies. The framework for containing violence and sexuality offered by these rites, the procedures for affiliation with the adult world which they implement, the re-elaboration of the symbolic which they impel, etc., make it possible to shed light on certain barriers that confront institutions for adolescents on a regular basis.
The analysis of a portion of a non-directive interview with a young adolescent leads the author to consider the institutional setting as an instance of reflectivity, whose function of limiting desire is not control over the subject but rather a way of helping him to escape from the psychic determinations which alienate him.
Freud approaches the beating fantasy “a child is being beaten” as part of the psychic dynamic of every individual. It appears at the end of the infantile period and derives from the psychic modifications which take place in three phases. This fantasy is rewritten in adolescence. Striking the parent is considered to be the enacting of every adolescent’s fantasy: “I am beating my parent.” It is understood that the phases occur in a condensed way, all at the same time, carried along by the outbreak of puberty. Each phase marks a different elaboration of the separation from Oedipal figures. The reemergence of this fantasy in adolescence overwhelms the thought system, allowing strong oedipal desires to coexist while punishing another person for not stopping these fantasies.
The authors suggest to ponder on the topic of a rise of acted violence in the adolescent population and question the psychoanalytic understanding of destructive both heteroaggressive and self‑aggressive movements. Several theoretical positions on the topic of the death instinct, or of drive unbinding or an attempt to save a feeling of identity when violence surges are analyzed briefly, followed by two clinical vignettes. From the latter cases, they try to link the intrapsychological and family links underlying the recourse to violent actings with such subjects, as related with adolescent problematics. The temporary identification dilemma is here suggested as well as the interdependence between self‑violence and violence towards the other person.
Far more than any other period of life, adolescence is the container of a whole series of processes already inscribed within the child at birth. It is according to an adequate answer from the objects that these processes will reach full development. Violence to be will then take the shape of a life project, i.e. the expression of the superego signing the completion of adolescence. Such is not the fate of sexual aggressors. Non integrated violence leads them to let their ego being dissolved in the interplay of several processes. The aggression of the other person thus becomes a defence against an hallucinatory intrusion.
Every adolescent, at every generation, is violently caught within a social context and implied within a problematics of transmission and filiation, of debt and heritage. Whether they be alone or in a group, adolescents are actors/witnesses introducing their objects, their discourses and their types of behaviour in places where they go through. Adolescence is an unstable category, without any specific seat and which may either be appropriated or melancholized. The adolescent scene, vulnerable as it is, questions forcibly the institutions and demands that a potential space should be fit enabling the transformation of both the psychological and the social that are implied within such a passage. It is a turning point where collective and individual stakes are condensed and where violences swarm and become cristallized. The adolescent scene thus becomes a violent dramatization at the crossroads between the psychological and the social.
Telemachus is the very example of a successfully achieved adolescence and entry into the adult world. Yet it is a deconstructed pattern, described each in its own way by Fenelon and Aragon, letting appear a drive violence whose mental functioning feeds itself whereas at the same time it strives, now with a variable success, at taming, thus revealing the richness and the depth of that mythical figure
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 archaïc body into a body caught within the language and its signifiers
Reading Sophocles’ tragedies about the Labdacides family, i.e. Œdipus Rex, Œdipus in Colone, and Antigone gives us an example of the compulsion to repeat through a succession of violent actings as a consequence of traumatic transgenerational psychological violence. Along with the move towards subjectivization proper to adolescence, the legacy of psychological trauma may entail the subject, likewise Antigone, towards a heroic identification which, for the sake of the good cause, will however do nothing but feed the repetition of violence
It denies the subjectivity of whoever has to bear it, but reflects mirrorlike a threat on the subfectivy of whoever enacts it. Thus it may be considered as a primary defence reaction from a threatened identity. The experience of institutional life in psychiatry as well as the psychotherapies of subjects suffering from behaviour disorders are a priviledged place to study the latter one. Adolescence is a life stage most liable to expressions of violence due to the nature of the psychological changes that are imposed by puberty. Care should take into account such specificities of the psychological functioning of violent patients. The space for such care should be viewed as a figuration of the internal psychological space of the patient and its handling should be made a means to allow the relationships they need to become tolerable. Mediations and a concrete third function have a very special seat whithin such a handling.
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