Jocelyne Chastang : remorse and remords (“ re-bite ”), troubling homonyms

Resituating remorse in relation to the scopic drive and maternal castration, in line with the work of Bonnet (Remorse. Psychoanalysis of a Murderer), this paper attempts to determine the evolution of this affect, and especially its involvement in the process of adolescence. The hypothesis that remorse, as anxiety of fright, can under certain conditions push one to act, will be developed, using the case of a patient who committed a motiveless murder in late adolescence. By reconstructing the childhood and adolescence of this patient, we will emphasize how hatred and infantile remorse coming from the earliest mother-child relations will be contained in adolescence only by self-destructive responses, pathological wanderings, drug abuse … These solutions rendered invalid by the impasse of puberty will lead the subject, “ haunted ” by maternal imagos, to the murderous act.