The problems of the intersubjective linnk do not coincide with the concepts of intrapsychical binding, of identification and object-relationship. From the psychoanalytical point of view, the consistency of the link is the specific unconscious psychical reality built by the meeting of two or several subjects. In terms of process, the link is the more or less stable movement of the investments, the representations and the actions which associate two or several subjects for the fulfilment of some their desires, or the deployment of common defences. Distinct from that which organizes the intrapsychical space of the singular subject, the logic of the link is that of the reciprocal implications, inclusions and mutual exclusions. The author defines the requirements of psychic work necessary to establish a link. He shows the epistemological stakes of a « third topic », heard like that of the intersubjectivity in his relationship with the internal space of the subjects of the link.
This reflection relates to the passage between childhood and adolescence, and postulates that the experience of puberty troubles the defensive intellectual over-investment of the latency period. I suspect that in the gifted adolescent, giftedness, which is founded upon still-active infantile depression, does not enable construction of the psychical dams Freud speaks of; it is only a narcissistic show which collapses at the appearance of pubertary emergences.
In this article, we try to analyse the difficulties youths have in recognizing themselves and being recognized as French. The complexity of their relations with citizen status engenders both deep insecurities and the dynamics of victimhood. Current laws on immigration reinforce these feelings and confirm for adolescents the risk of being banished from society. It is important to analyze these dynamics socially but also psychically, and to identify how we may situate ourselves as educators or psychologists.
The authors’aim, starting from the speech of suffering from which problems of loneliness emerge, is to repatriate this notion into the metapsychological frame of reference, in order to raise it to the dignity of concept and to rid themselves of any purely phenomenological or interactionist vision. The conceptualization of loneliness then passes by the Freudian reference to Hilflosigkeit, psychical helplessness and ontological discontinuity which opens up a dimension of a bond that is other than fusional, i.e., a bond which we would describe as a linguistic link, following J. Lacan. D. W. Winnicott proposes a « capacity to be alone », loneliness which supports psychic installation of the other. It is related to the potential space where the creative way of life of the individual appears. This epistemology then serves as a pretext to question our practice and the tranferential stakes of the clinical encounter. Isn’t this precisely affirmed as the dynamic and creative space to be alone in the presence of the Other ? This prospect should enable us more largely to question the springs of the social bond of which the private clinic of adolescence is an emblematic figure.
The link between adolescence and the paranormal is frequently underlined. There is indeed a singular relationship with this domain during adolescence. It would thus be a question of possible strategies used by a subjectivity in a borderline state under the blow of the reality of the puberty. Would not the relationship with the paranormal, as a name for indefiniteness and death, be that of a structuring « believing » based upon « parricidal unbelieving » ?
In this article a distinction will be made between « paranoia » or « bond-paranoia » and paranoid structure. At adolescence, the subject is confronted to the failure of the Other. One way to counter this fall is to make it exist as his persecutor. Bond-paranoia thus finds its raison d’être in this crisis of the relation to the Other.
The therapeutic management of a teenage girl, in whose case history body attacks, either in the form of somatization or acting out/auto aggression, made it possible to understand better the morbid practices of auto-mutilation beyond the classical forms of attacking (at the moment of puberty) the body baring the genital sexuality. Attacking the body (either internally or on the surface) shows the dysfunction of the psychical movement, which goes hand in hand with a pathological Ego-skin in two ways : the first, multi pores showing the defect of pare excitation; the second, the protective shell trying to « keep everything in » when faced with the anxiety of emptiness, leading to self-poisoning. Using a topographical model, the skin wounds are to be considered in their explosive dimension to change the self, like true « psychical air vents » for the psyche threatened with asphyxiation. Paradoxically, these wounds open up a detoxifying movement of projection taking phobic or persecutory forms necessary to build up a « withholding » front, able to welcome the pubertal Eros detoxified of its « impulsion madness ».
The passage through adolescence itself raises the question of the act and its different dimensions, which we will approach from a clinical point of view in this article. If the act which separates the subject from the Other introduces a rupture, it also allows him to find a new symbolic position. In this article we wish to explore the dimensions of the act and its connection with anxiety, using the case of a young paranoiac subject who, with the help of analytical work, struggles not to be in the position of object to which he could be reduced by the risks associated with the dimension of the passage to the act.
School, both the symbolical organisation of the social body and the setting up/building up of the individual, operates on the relations between power and desire. But this way of looking at the structuring of people’s craving for knowledge must be combined with an analysis of School and of the relationships to the Other that are generated by the Academic Institution. Then this process will make it possible to assess the understanding of the Discontents of the French School Institution as the actor/promoter of a monistic republican Citizenship. In the French social system within which school plays the part of leaven, the Other must turn into the Same. Through this, we can understand how tense relationships at school are.
By attempting to clarify the terms paranoid and paranoia in adolescence, we propose to show how a logical approach, introduced by the structural approach, may be articulated with the very movement of the adolescent process. This centers on notion of the « empty box », as it may be encountered in conceptions of the Feminine and the pubertary real.
The theoretical principles of structuralism, the analytical theorization of the pubertary process and psychiatric nosology will be discussed, with the aim, beyond its apparent complexity, of articulating a set of elements that could make them intelligible to one another.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 627-640.
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