This article presents a theoretical framework for thinking about seemingly psychotic manifestations in adolescence. Between the archaic and the actual, the paradigm of pubertary psychosis frees itself from hasty references to the risk of schizophrenia and gives new value to the notion of potentiality as a process. Pubertary psychosis turns out to have an eminently borderline character and its symptoms necessitate ways of treatment that cover the spectrum of a work of the negative that is necessary but uncertain.
The work of the negative in adolescence is here presented as contributing to alexithymia insofar as it entails an avoidance of a traumatic sensoriality. So adolescence may be understood not only as a reactivation of the Oedipus complex, but also as a risk of sensorial resurgence akin to that which occurs at the beginning of life. A treatment based on sensoriality is conceivable.
If in the past pathological figures of the religious in part issued from the question of excessive ritualization (the obsessive side of religion highlighted by Freud), couldn’t one affirm that the model of the religious is today a narcissistic one ? For the essential is no longer the aspect of control (defence against death anxiety) of the religious (the obsessive type), or the search, under the sign of lack, for the never obtained object of mystical desire (along hysterical lines), but a validation through faith that is always unfulfilled in itself, and the subject’s correlative struggle against abandonment anxiety and the loss of the bond. From this perspective, we will explore the work of the negative at work in postmodern mysticism, in which the performing aspect of believing navigates between the void of abandonment and the figures of the religious space that it must create.
The « adolescent not for consumption » applies to a large number of adolescents struggling against parents who abuse their power by exploiting them to the point of denying their status as subject. Many of these adolescents succumb to self-destructive behaviors in order to spare their parents, the fundamental targets of their violence. Others escape this restriction and manage to preserve the process of subjectivation. They show that there can be solutions that might help keep the others from becoming consumable.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 851-859.
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