Family consultations with the L. family revealed how adolescent processes constitute a sort of vector which gives shape to different drive activity within the family. Analysis of the family’s psychical metabolism, sibling disputes, the impact of inter-generational, transgenerational, and extra-familial conflicts, showed that the adolescent processes in Thomas, Mme. L.’s thirteen year-old son from a previous marriage, exercised a kind of attraction over the family’s implicit violence. The inner rupture of development in the young teenager also causes a rupture of unconscious alliances among the members of this family.
Archives par mot-clé : Violence
LAURENCE CORTHAY-CASOT, OLIVIER HALFON : VIOLENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF ADOLESCENCE
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.
CLAUDE BALIER : VIOLENCE WITH REFERENCE TO ADOLESCENT PROCESSES
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.
MICHELLE CADORET : CONTEXT AND CULTURE : THE VIOLENCE OF THE ADOLESCENT SCENE
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.
RAYMOND CAHN : BENEATH VALUES : VIOLENCE. ABOUT TELEMACHUS
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.
SERGE LESOURD : FROM NARCISSISTIC VIOLENCE TO THE MOTHER IMAGE. ABOUT AN UNDEFINABLE ADOLESCENT GIRL
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.
JOSETTE FRAPPIER : THE LEGACY OF VIOLENCE AS HEROISM
Reading Sophocles’ tragedies about the Labdacides family, i.e. ådipus Rex, ådipus 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.
François Lebigot : young french soldiers put to the test in sarajevo
The French army’s new assignments (peacekeeping, interposition) though particularly trying psychologically, have shown in both the youngest and the more seasoned soldiers an astonishing capacity for dominating their own violence. The situations they have had to face in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, described here, bring together all the conditions liable to drive these subjects into uncontrollable drive overflow.
From this one could conclude that youths who join the army, often as they are emerging from a difficult adolescence, are looking for discipline, order, an ideal that would enable them to have peaceful relations with others. Because of the place and the time in question, they have often paid dearly for their learning, and missed the hoped-for reconciliation with humanity.
Serge Tisseron : how to help adolescents not to be duped by images
The tendency to believe in images is fundamental to psychical life. However, images – especially violent ones – can suggest models, but are by themselves unable to impose the desire to correspond to them. They are most often sought for their power of figuring, as much in the domain of body states and archaic imagery as of day-to-day emotions that are sometimes difficult to represent.
Adolescents spontaneously use three complementary means of managing the malaise provoked in them by violent images : language, interior representations and corporal representations. These three means are the key to education with images.
Alberto Eiguer : why don’t adolescents like family parties?
In order to find out the reasons for this refusal, the author examines the limits of the concept of manic defense, the characteristics of all family parties (a ritual evoking family origins and the belonging of family members, but which also brooks any excess or overflow), the singular nature of adolescent partying (hyperactivity and plugging into archaic sensations), in order to pinpoint what makes them clash. Adolescents don’t like family parties because they are the vehicle for a genealogical order in which they imagine they have no place. This would explain why they can’t stand the apologetic tone of such parties or the certainties supposedly derived from the mythical allegories expressed in them. This rejection is in agreement with their aim to build a neo-filiation for themselves, which leads them towards other groups and other parties (rave parties); but this is only the visible face of another quest, whose object is a place for themselves in the genealogy.