Hell is the place of remorse hiding behind the mask of guilt. It stigmatizes the “ anxiety of eternity ”, the lament of the patient Judas sunk in the unrepresentable and the fixity of time. His psychical position is that of a homosexual feminine identification in relation to an archaic mother, a return of death. The eternal hell is immobilized in the control of religious figurations tied to parental imagos in religious culture.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Remords – 2002 T.20 n° 4
Marika Moisseeff : monsters as a symbol of horrific motherhood,or female initiation for the use of adolescents
Adolescent sexuality has become an overriding concern : it seems essential, these days, to guard against its unfortunate consequences, the foremost of which is pregnancy. At the same time, motherhood and adolescents’metamorphosis into virtual procreators are among the favorite subjects of American television series aimed at this age group. The feminine reproductive function is presented in these series as a potentially deadly, parsitic phenomenon, a demonic force that threatens humanity. The redeeming hero is a female and the path she follows is comparable to an initiation
Jocelyne Chastang : remorse and remords (“ re-bite ”), troubling homonyms
Resituating remorse in relation to the scopic drive and maternal castration, in line with the work of Bonnet (Remorse. Psychoanalysis of a Murderer), this paper attempts to determine the evolution of this affect, and especially its involvement in the process of adolescence. The hypothesis that remorse, as anxiety of fright, can under certain conditions push one to act, will be developed, using the case of a patient who committed a motiveless murder in late adolescence. By reconstructing the childhood and adolescence of this patient, we will emphasize how hatred and infantile remorse coming from the earliest mother-child relations will be contained in adolescence only by self-destructive responses, pathological wanderings, drug abuse … These solutions rendered invalid by the impasse of puberty will lead the subject, “ haunted ” by maternal imagos, to the murderous act.
Stéphanie Frémont : violent sex act and overflow of remorse in adolescence : the story of leila
Using the conceptualization of Bonnet and the story of a sixteen year-old girl pushed to commit rape upon the person of another girl, several ideas can be brought forward regarding the specificity of remorse in adolescence and its impact in triggering violent acts.
If remorse is inscribed very early in the history of the subject, transmitted through filiation and taken up according to the subject’s place in the generational order and his own life experiences, adolescence gives it even more weight, insofar as the subject is pressed by his pubescent body into bringing out fantasmatic family pacts which imprison him in order to accede to a genital identity. Remorse in adolescence signals, for the adolescent, the impossibility of using his sex as an excuse, and attests to his enclosure in an impasse between primary identification with the active and almighty mother and the secondary, Oedipal, identification. Running up against the newness of genitality, remorse may lead the subject to the passage to the act, that crazy moment of the remorse overflowing which paradoxically signals both the subject’s incapacity to get on the way to the accomplishment of puberty and his ultimate attempt, a vain and desperate one, to once again become the subject of his history. And if this act fails in its liberating aims, perhaps it can permit the subject, supported by the transferential bond, to begin to speak again.
Mahommed Ham : from wandering to exile, or the paradigme for language
Through a clinical confrontation, the author shows how the listening is rough with the insistence of the purely descriptive account; and exactly when the dead end of the transference – counter transference is made of a sense of remorse. His analysis unfolds also a heuristics inspired by the language of their meeting and their primary language: Arabic. The latter by virtue of its specific structuration allows some words to assume the shape of metapsychological concepts, and at the same time to be a linguistic rest which open onto a lecture of trauma with an exit registred towards the working out of the letter.
François Richard : a remorse of proust : contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of creation
In this article it is hypothesized that throughout Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past we find the traces of a censorship of the emergence of sexuality at puberty. Explicitly evoked in Against Sainte-Beuve, the moment of discovering the newness of puberty reappears afterwards only in a veiled way in Remembrance of Things Past. The work seeks to repair the destructive effects of this censorship and remorse through a specific aesthetic whose libidinal economy is analyzed here (in particular, the fantasy of the “ lesbian-man ”, a certain fetishism, and the permanent metaphorization of castration anxiety). A new regard can then be brought to bear on the well-known Proustian aporias about temporality.
Gérard Pirlot : the guilty pleasure of remorse … or the one of teeth biting the eye of the unconscious
If in the case of the patient called “ Didier ” described by Bonnet, a whole psychotherapeutic work is necessary, once the narcissistic bases have been consolidated, to make remorse appear as the starting point of a genuine psychoanalytical work, things can be very different with a neurotic patient. Remorse, sometimes there from the start, actually attests to a too great attachment to the maternal imago, which then limits any possibility of subjectively assumed guilt. Thus the author, using a clinical vignette of a subject in analysis, after having brought remorse nearer to reproach and evoked the link between remorse and auto-sadism (narcissistic sadism), attempts to define what the term connotes meta-psychologically, following the different French and German etymologies of the term “ remorse ”… The drive economy of remorse reveals itself to be a putting into play of oral sadism mixed with scopic and controlling drives ; its dynamic is a conflict of psychical forces which may extend from hallucinatory perceptions (cf. the nightmare) to somatization (dizziness, “ second state ”, etc.) or passage to the act ; and finally, its topic is ego-splitting before the castrating omnipotence of a maternal and totemic superego ( “ an eye for an eye ”). In the sado-anal regression which characterizes it, remorse is a form of return of psychical function into the “ primitive cavity ” described by Spitz, which then serves as a “ container ” for the ego’s Self (its the narcissistic bases). The subject in the throes of remorse, like Cain, or Oedipus at Colonnus, “ crushed ” (subjectively) by a guilt that menaces the cohesion of the Self of his ego, can regress alone in remorse until he “ re-bites ” (re-mord) repeatedly this ego through an “ incisive ” and castrating superego. The therapeutic and analytic treatment of remorse will aim to “ transfer ” on to the psychoanalyst, through speech, the guilt underlying this remorse in order to free it from this self-sadistic auto-erotic muck which is remorse.
Maurice Despinoy : remorse and reparation in adolescents
To select an unique mental element – defence, drive or affect – is an unusual approach for a clinician. The adolescent face the disruption of puberty by schizo-paranoïds processes. However, under the influence of past identifications and Ego-ideal, the depressive position reappears and remorse is expressed. But need of the other is often more important than real concern.
Yvon Brès : the saving sin
A civilization marked by Christianity, which asserted that every man is a sinner and developed in each of its members a consciousness of sin risks being followed by one in which remorse could, on the one hand, thanks to its rejected, secretly gnaw at the psyche of individuals who think themselves free of all guilt ; and, on the other hand, could be projected endlessly onto others in the irrational pursuit of vengeance rather than justice.
Gérard Bonnet : remorse, from freud’s self-analysis to the clinical treatment of adolescents
The author takes off from a prior work relating the place of remorse in the analysis of an adolescent who became a murderer in order to reread and re-interpret the place of this affect in the texts where Freud speaks of his self-analysis. He points out an implicit theory, which ties in with the explicit theory, barely sketched out, and emphasizes in particular the active and positive side of this affect most often presented as a handicap. He then shows the different faces that remorse can assume in the treatment of the adolescent, working with the principle characteristics pointed out in the preceding discussion, so as to facilitate its detection, its being taken into consideration, and its evolution. This study also seeks to help better differentiate the major affects and to show how to position ourselves when one of them appears central and dominant, whether it be shame, guilt, sadness, or remorse.