In order to find out the reasons for this refusal, the author examines the limits of the concept of manic defense, the characteristics of all family parties (a ritual evoking family origins and the belonging of family members, but which also brooks any excess or overflow), the singular nature of adolescent partying (hyperactivity and plugging into archaic sensations), in order to pinpoint what makes them clash. Adolescents don’t like family parties because they are the vehicle for a genealogical order in which they imagine they have no place. This would explain why they can’t stand the apologetic tone of such parties or the certainties supposedly derived from the mythical allegories expressed in them. This rejection is in agreement with their aim to build a neo-filiation for themselves, which leads them towards other groups and other parties (rave parties); but this is only the visible face of another quest, whose object is a place for themselves in the genealogy.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Mettre en scène – 2005 T.23 n°3
Joëlle Nouhet : mangamania and cosplay
Mangas fans gather by the thousands to « cosplay » or « party » together. Cosplay is a group activity combining elements of play and exhibitionism. Participants dress up as their favorite mangas characters. The article discusses the functions of play, metonymy and metaphor expressed in the cosplayers’ costumes. After listening to Rachel, an adolescent cosplayer, it examines the function of the costume as an expression of creativity and as a protective envelope containing narcissistic elements of identity and difference. Thanks to the costume the cosplayer can be both baby-like and « sexy » and thus able to cope with the anxieties of her own fixed adult sexuality. She can explore without inhibition her infantile erogenous sensations.
Stefano Bolognini : punkabbestia : a tiring consultation
The author re-transcribes the single encounter he had with a « punkabbestia » adolescent, who comes to the consultation at his parents’ request, for a possible treatment referral. The therapist’s counter-transference is analyzed in detail.
Olivier Douville : feasts and anthropological contexts
The author defines what constitutes a feast in different anthropological contexts. Relying upon the works of R. Caillois and L. Levi Makarius, he shows the limits of the parallel between feast and transgression, and contrasts the modern rave-party and remembrance with regard to the dimension of the memory.
Noëlla Darcq, Miguel Gomez : the counter-transference faced with an exposed body
The bodily transformations associated with the psychical processes of the pubertaire lead adolescents within their group to latch onto fashions in clothing and ornament, in order to differentiate and individualize themselves. Among these fashions, youngsters are attracted to some more marginal movements, like the gothic style. These adolescents’ bodies then become a theater stage, where the play being enacted resonates with their own history, which is sometimes a traumatic one. Moreover, other youngsters make a spectacle of their own body, but the narration seems stuck, as though there were a disassociation between the body and the mind. In light of some clinical vignettes, the authors will attempt to develop the relations between the use of the body and the pubertaire dynamic of the process of individuation/separation within the problematic of the borderline personality: when thought is short-circuited, corporal expression is brought to the fore. But this kind of expression does not always elicit the same reaction in the clinician: he will be able – or not be able – to think, to associate, to induce a different transference relation. Lastly, these comments will as a whole make reference to some artistic works that have broached this subject, in particular Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Perrault’s Peau d’âne, and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.
Caroline Lebrun : metaphorical and metonymical functions of clothing
After some considerations about the identity effects of clothing, the article shows how, in adolescence, clothing can serve a metaphorical and metonymical function, and how the therapist can make use of this, especially in cases of psychosis.
Serge Tisseron : new families and new images : narcissism’s new clothes
Transformations affecting youngsters’ relationship with their own image result from their adaptation to two radically new situations they are confronted with from earliest childhood : the omnipresence of images – most notably those that their parents make of them – and new family organizations in which the desire the child observes is maintained for a longer and longer time. « Being famous » is then perceived as the privileged means for resolving several contradictory desires and anxieties at the same time.
David le Breton : the adolescent scene : signs of identity
Peer culture is now replacing parent culture, transmission gives way to imitation. From now on one must measure up in the eyes of others, those of one’s age group, even if one must fight one’s parents in order to do this. One of the horrors of middle school and high school recess yards is to seen as the « buffoon » by failing to obtain the group’s approval, refusing a dare, or not displaying the right « brand » of clothes or shoes. Self esteem no longer comes from espousing the unanimous values that structure the social bond, it is no longer nourished in the mirror of elders or ancestors but in that of the peer group. The necessity for representation is found in both girls and boys, but not in the same manner.
Bernard Brusset : the figure of the anorexic in adolescence
The anorexic figures and illustrates the culture of anti-consumption and individualism, but the fascination it provokes goes well beyond this. It is exploited by television programs for its expressive strength as an enigma, the « golden cage » (Bruch), the mystery and the power of what appears to be choice of rupture with the family, with other adolescents, and with oneself. A heroic and sometimes deadly choice that is perceived as an accusation.
Multiple interpretations of mental anorexia according to some aspect of mores and models communicated by the dominant culture tend to deny its psychopathological specificity. Cultural and family factors, and traumatic events, are cited all the more in cases of minor forms of anorexia, or hysterical anorexia.
The spectacle of this supposedly deliberate choice, that of turning one’s back on the most basic and legitimate satisfactions, in order to risk death through the excesses of restrictive behavior involving more than just food, distracts attention from what psychoanalytical practice has shown: the strength of the anachronic affective demand (which can find a dangerous outlet in cases of bulimia) and of ambivalence in the relationship with the parents, and especially the mother, depending on the background of infanthood. This would explain why we find in the entourage, in proportion to the anxiety anorexia gives rise to, reactions amounting to a disavowal of meaning: there is nothing to understand, it’s a sickness, a brain abnormality. Though anorexics may refuse to be force fed, they do ask to be listened to ; behind the façade of a thin body fetish lies an upset and a demand to be heard.
Jean-Yves Chagnon : femininity between latency and adolescence
The rearrangement of identifications in the young girl as she moves from the end of childhood into adolescence is illustrated using elements from a study of preadolescents and their future development, a study carried out by means of interviews and projective methods. While the prepubescent and pubescent girls had the same average age, there are radical differences in the mutation of envelope femininity into orifice femininity depending on whether the girls have begun to menstruate or not ; this confirms the validity of hypotheses about the pubertaire proposed by Philippe Gutton. At the same time, psychical movements of separation from parental images take shape, providing a springboard towards subjectivation.