Clinical work in detention centers, with patients who are prone to destructiveness and delinquency, quickly brings the therapists face to face with a particular set of temporal issues. The immediacy of institutional responses to “the urgent need for subjectivation” sometimes imprisons these adolescents in harmful repetitions of the passage to the act. The clinician’s creativity then becomes a critical first response in making these places into possible transitional spaces.
Today’s adolescent is caught up in what could be called hypermodernity. With the arrival of technology, new ways of acting out have appeared, such as digital violence. Using a clinical case, the authors will examine digital acts of violence from the angle of psychoanalysis. More specifically, they will discuss the way that familial lack will be displaced onto a new scene, that of the digital, in an attempt to restore adolescent limits.
The digital era, with its proliferation of screens, gives adolescents a stage on which they can playact their desires and conflicts. The use of virtual worlds, handy projection supports determined by the encounter between one’s own virtualness and that of pixelated worlds, will accompany the adolescent process. The use of virtual worlds pauses the adolescent process, but this can lead to a morbid dis-objectalizing process that prevents the adolescent from becoming an adult.
The author, inspired by the work of D. Anzieu, will attempt to show that the sound envelope of the Self is punctured by the eruption of the genital sexual, which entails a de-structuring movement of the limits of the Self and its functions: containment, which provides the basis for the feeling of the continuity of the Self (limit between inside and outside), and the individuation of the Self (limits between Self and other). This movement, called pubertary sound violence, is illustrated by the myth of the Greek god Pan.
The use of psychoactive substances in adolescence enables one to experiment with what the psyche cannot approach. For Max, a gifted boy, drug use is more than a need for freedom, it is a way of defining his identity and facing the violence of the pubertary process. His drug use has a mediating function that will come to be part of a therapeutic relationship, especially in his experience of limits and of writing as sublimation.
Victor’s psychotherapy for functional headaches occurs four years after he was cured of benign brain tumors and one year after his parents’ divorce. It will help him to process early defects of primal symbolisation and will revitalize his capacities for representing, symbolising and experiencing affect, thanks to the dynamic of transference and counter-transference.
In self-cutting there is an incision that bleeds and leaves a more or less visible and permanent scar, which is invested with a combination of shame, aesthetic experience and intense power. The author will show how scars are invested in the context of what we call boundary issues and boundary work. This may be trophic, sustaining a transformative process in adolescents, especially through the scar; or it may be detrimental, when there is a sterile repetition of the act of self-cutting.
Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 11-23.
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