This review of the collection of articles directed by Sébastien Dupont and Hugues Paris emphasizes the adolescent girl’s aspect of evanescence, as it has been explored and exploited by contemporary cinema. The adolescent girl appears to be an expression of what eludes total understanding. The different figures of the adolescent girls, exhibited by the cinematic work, attest to an effect of diffraction which is linked to the experience of drives imposed on the subject.
Michael Jackson’s life was akin to a long one man show that ended when he was barely fifty years old. What did the adolescence of the star represent, for himself first of all ? Indeed, the physical transformations of puberty will for him generate massive anxieties, causing virulent and repeated attacks against his own body, finally leading to a genuine destruction of his physical appearance. His inability to accept these inherent elements of puberty were nevertheless counterbalanced by the sublimatory value of his artistic creativity. Thus the moonwalk, the artist’s true signature, an acted and performed expression, may be the translation of fantasy scenario closely tied to the trauma of puberty and maternal castration. Recourse to a phenomenon of « extimization » of internal reality could thus have manage to produce a sublimated actualization of fantasies transformed in the fire of his esthetic creation.
In the course of his career Michael Jackson became a planetary pop music icon. His journey and, above all, what he showed in his music videos enable us to bring out two central aspects illustrating the impasse of the elaboration of adolescent processes overlaying a failure of the integration of the genital body : the failure of the sex-differentiated encounter with an underlying phobia of women and the fetishization of the body through the choice of isolated organs as a way of preserving the omnipotent infantile body associated with the disavowal of castration.
Michael Jackson is a figure of eternal adolescence, replaying a painful and inaccessible process of individuation. His metamorphoses echo the psychical and physical transformations of pubescent youngsters. His myth, shot through with genealogical ruptures, evokes a character in the throes of a powerful desire for self-engenderment. His polymorphism maximizes the possibilities for adolescent identification and his media-genic quality helps him to be appropriated as a social demand. His ability to incarnate omnipotence makes him a likely support for projection, as he echoes the narcissistic desires of young people.
By analyzing Michael Jackson’s « Thriller » video, we offer a discussion of adolescent metamorphosis. Through an extraordinary self-fiction linking cinematic reference to myth and science fiction, Jackson shows, with a radical and transgressive postmodern gesture, the ridiculousness of such oppositions as man-woman, angel-demon, human-animal, living-dead, reality-fiction – mere pairings whose structuring power he shatters. What can one say about a body primary function seems to be go from one transformation to another, to keep metamorphosizing into harrowing new extremes, in order to replay the metamorphosis of adolescence, which is here marked by a tragic negativity?
The adult human other takes up the conceptualization hitherto worked on as « the parental subject of the transference ». His humanity is an expression of his willingness to participate in the pubertary processes during sublimation. This other represents the adult-ness that shows the control of the second topic and can thus support interpretation by the infantile « already-there » of the innovating pubertary as well as adolescent subjectal creation. The closeness of the bond is not without risk.
Anxiety about guilt, as Freud showed in 1916, may be the origin of transgressive behaviors. The delinquent passage to the act, distinguished by its intrapsychical dynamic of resorting to the act, fits in with Freud’s hypothesis. Adolescence can give rise to a feeling of guilt engendered by parricidal fantasies, but also to the need for punishment as the symbolic equivalent to homosexual submission to the father, who can confer his masculinity upon the son.
Using a case involving a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and exchanges between therapists during a Seminar in Adolescent Psychotherapy, we will try to pinpoint what underlies the issue of identity conquest and the problem of homosexuality in adolescence. The « fantasy of the blade » – a reference to the religious identificatory figure of St. George – helps organize theoretical and clinical observations.
It is standard practice to attribute the human acts of excessive violence that occur regularly in private and in public to an unleashing of aggressive drives : one speaks of the weakness of instances of the superego which have not fulfilled their role. Freud regularly refers to this schema, starting with his establishment of the second topic, and he is the inspiration behind most of the educational models now in force. However, the very ideals that are supposed to control drives can sometimes lead to violent passages to the act. In such cases, there is idealization without sublimation, and the ideal which is at the heart of the idealization is invested for its own sake. Instead of being the vector for desires, opening the way for sublimation, it bottles up drive energy and liberates it in an explosive way. This is why a deeper analysis of ideals is needed if one is to discover the components of the explosion and the way of dealing with it.
Adolescent exaltation before its idol will considered as a fundamentally religious moment. To grasp the psychical stakes of this social phenomenon, the author suggests that its metapsychological coordinates and function be considered in light of the scene of Hiflosigkeit – the matrix of religious representations. The idol will be understood as the perceptive image which saturates the gaze, thus annihilating the blind spot which establishes perception from the starting point of lack (la Chose). Paradoxically, this passion for the idol will be turn out to be a rampart against desire. This reading enables us to understand better the unusual strategy of the monotheistic Jewish religion against idolatry – which de-totalizes the figure that cannot withstand lack. Finally, to understand how the idol is a specifically adolescent phenomenon, the author offers a rereading of the idea of sexual trauma, as revealed by the moment of adolescence.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 885-896.
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