In this article, the author uses Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves to explore the place of sensoriality in adolescence. By putting into perspective the particular qualities of Virgina Woolf’s writing, which has been characterized as sensorial, the article will try to shed light on the links between sensoriality, continuity of being, and the redeployments of identification and subjectivation of loss in adolescence, especially as seen in the relations between the protagonists and the key character of Perceval.
In the context of grave illness, the specific qualities of the work of ordinary adolescence are tinted with problems inherent to the sick body, especially the control of the biological dimension and its lethalness. Two recent novels help us to understand how the resulting psychical and fantasy configurations infiltrate pubertary reorganizations in which appear issues of the sexual, sexuality, and romantic love in adolescence.
The author shows how, in counter-transference experiences of precession, or gradual re-orientation, the wounded body of the analyst can let itself be invested as a place for representation of the transposition of the patient’s unconscious fantasies of castration. This gradual shifting of the axis of the countertransference should be understood as a valuable tool for the meta-psychological of unconscious process, even before the first analytical encounter.
Adolescent selfies intrigue the psychoanalyst, and their widespread proliferation on social media lead us to revisit the mirror stage. Are these self-images a reflecting mirror or an empty mirror? Even when they are enormously narcissistic, selfies come from a quest for identity, even a quest for beauty, and may be kindred with self-portrait. Beyond the ludic and narcissistic aspects, they are linked with fundamental questions of identity, sexuality and death.
The onset of a handicap in adolescence upsets the relationship between self and other. Using clinical material from groups of hospitalized adolescents, this article discusses a theorization of the handicapped adolescent’s psychical transformations and reorganizations, based on concepts of the Oedipus complex and the Brother complex. The authors develop the hypothesis of a Sister complex whose specific characteristic is confrontation with passivation.
The adolescent refuses the debt of life and demands autonomy and consideration. But present-day society offers the adolescent weakened parents. The reality of the contemporary adolescent looks like a quest suspended between a necessary appropriation of himself and discreet gifts made to his parents. If these gifts are not received and don’t manage to introduce parents and adolescent to a new way of relating, we should consider that there is a risk of exhaustion in the adolescent.
In an older adolescent with psychosomatic symptoms, the autosadistic symptom of trichotrillomania brings together deficiencies in the Body-ego and its attempts at autoerotic appropriation. These repeated traumatophiliac wounds are a survival method maintaining the excitation of a disavowed maternal absence whose memory traces infiltrate the memory of the sick body. What is at stake in the therapy is the revisiting, in the transference, of the homo- function and primitive auto-reflection.
It is often in adolescence that great athletes are discovered. Once they commit to their sport, their bodies are subject to intense training pushing them beyond the limits of what is normal. Sometimes these youths go too far. Unable to express and to be understood in words, their subjectivity comes to be expressed through their bodies, through a sometimes traumatizing wound.
Activity seems to fulfill important functions for the work of masculinity that takes place during adolescence. What happens when this work is hampered by somatic illness? In light of a clinical vignette, these functions of differentiation/delimitation, of containing and support, but also of experimentation and virile potency will be explored.
Adolescence is the time of metamorphosis, of encountering the other. But well before the onset of puberty, the child who has received a diagnosis of chronic illness is obliged to confront the arrival of a disquieting stranger who pounces on him: disease. How does puberty fit in with a body already marked by illness? Would not the emergence of the sexual body be a way of truly appropriating the sick body?
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 551-561.
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