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.
Whiteness is a form of resignation from the self, a wish to erase oneself from an existence which has become nothing more than a sort of heavy weight. Indifference to oneself leads to self-exposure to a danger that is no longer perceived as such, since the youngster no longer inhabits himself completely. It is an unconscious form of will, not so much to die as to not be here anymore. It attests to the impossibility of being an individual and of investing oneself as the subject of one’s own existence. Whitening techniques are so many attempts to get rid of oneself in order not to have to put up with the pressures of an unbearable identity.
The aim of this article is to try to draw a connection between the relative banality of the control fantasy illustrated by the myth of Pygmalion and the madness of the pedophilic predator captivated by the minimal lines he sketches at the passage of certain pre-adolescent girls. He will give himself a right, sometimes unlimited, to this object who incarnates his fantasy ; but the girl he picks has no other reality for him beyond the appearance he gives to her. She becomes a living fetish that he will model as he wishes and whose principle function is to enable him to go on ignoring his hatred of women and his insurmountable rivalry with the mother who, unlike himself, can bring children into the world.
This text brings together several different perspectives : the aesthetic issue of the bond between creator and his work, the psycho-sociological and historical issue of the generational norm in the romantic relationship, and above all the psychopathological, ethical and legal issue of the pedophilic seducer. Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 817-840.
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