Archives de catégorie : ENG – Violence – 1998 T. 16 n°1

MICHELLE CADORET : CONTEXT AND CULTURE : THE VIOLENCE OF THE ADOLESCENT SCENE

Every adolescent, at every generation, is violently caught within a social context and implied within a problematics of transmission and filiation, of debt and heritage. Whether they be alone or in a group, adolescents are actors/witnesses introducing their objects, their discourses and their types of behaviour in places where they go through. Adolescence is an unstable category, without any specific seat and which may either be appropriated or melancholized. The adolescent scene, vulnerable as it is, questions forcibly the institutions and demands that a potential space should be fit enabling the transformation of both the psychological and the social that are implied within such a passage. It is a turning point where collective and individual stakes are condensed and where violences swarm and become cristallized. The adolescent scene thus becomes a violent dramatization at the crossroads between the psychological and the social.

RAYMOND CAHN : BENEATH VALUES : VIOLENCE. ABOUT TELEMACHUS

Telemachus is the very example of a successfully achieved adolescence and entry into the adult world. Yet it is a deconstructed pattern, described each in its own way by Fenelon and Aragon, letting appear a drive violence whose mental functioning feeds itself whereas at the same time it strives, now with a variable success, at taming, thus revealing the richness and the depth of that mythical figure.

SERGE LESOURD : FROM NARCISSISTIC VIOLENCE TO THE MOTHER IMAGE. ABOUT AN UNDEFINABLE ADOLESCENT GIRL

Starting from the taking care of an undefinable young adolescent girl as seen in an emergency ward, the author develops a new reading of primary narcissistic disorders resting on the vicissitudes of the subject’s trying to erect some decent psychological mother image. Hence both bodies act as  » container  » within the relationship leading the subject, when confronted to forbiddings, to react in terms of actings rather than of words. The handling of such adolescents compels one to reconstruct, within transference, an introjected mother image hence turning the archaÔc body into a body caught within the language and its signifiers.

JOSETTE FRAPPIER : THE LEGACY OF VIOLENCE AS HEROISM

Reading Sophocles’ tragedies about the Labdacides family, i.e. ådipus Rex, ådipus in Colone, and Antigone gives us an example of the compulsion to repeat through a succession of violent actings as a consequence of traumatic transgenerational psychological violence. Along with the move towards subjectivization proper to adolescence, the legacy of psychological trauma may entail the subject, likewise Antigone, towards a heroic identification which, for the sake of the good cause, will however do nothing but feed the repetition of violence.