Archives par mot-clé : Body

Guy Scharmann : hand games

Using three different references (a small survey, a book by G. Haddad, and two clinical vignettes), the author tries to raise some questions about the handshakes exchanged at psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic sessions; a way of investigating, through this aspect of the setting, the place of the body in the treatment, and its eventual « putting into the session ».

Maurice Corcos, Emma Sabouret, Denis Bochereau : sublimations in adolescence “ of sound and fury ”

Rap as art and a way of sublimation, like or following the example of intellectual activity? This creation of sound and scenery, a new form of expression, exchange or communion gives anyone who’s willing to listen an additional chance to encounter the contemporary adolescent psyche. Using sociological perspectives sparingly, we will instead investigate more deeply the bodily roots and emphasize the elaborative potential of rap. The fact remains that its paths, meanderings, waverings, forking paths and orbits diverge and move away, irreducibly no doubt, from those of earlier generations.
Our world is nevertheless a shared one; more and more interconnected, overlapping, interpenetrating. A formidable era, wherein the teen is more and more in the adult, more than anywhere else.

Brice Courty : sketch 3, on the virtual

We have discussed the issues and limits the adolescent faces in managing his body through the use of an avatar in on-line games and communities. If the avatar may first appear very limited to us in the figuration of the real body, these limits finally seem to help the adolescent filter the pubertaire’s access to these virtual worlds, to make it into a place of narcissistic restoration, at the cost of drive activity that must other outlets in this universe.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 249-254.

Jacques Vargioni : father, can’t you see I’m bleeding ?

The analysis of the transference and counter-transference of an obese woman’s therapy leads to an understanding of the role of a traumatic pubertaire event in the constitution of a bulimic symptom during the adolescence. Dead ends imposed by this experience, a deferred action effect of the infantile, block the pacifying possibility of repression and lead to a reversal/turning round of the drive. This drive fate organizes a melancholic form of the primal scene in which the subject is guilty. It is then the body, as support of the ego and of the incorporated object that is to be attacked and protected. Force-feeding, as a centripetal movement from outside towards inside, appears as a way of opposing a fantasy of emptying and potential seduction represented by menstrual bleeding.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 977-989.

Florian Houssier : Michael Jackson, from moonwalk to the fetishized body

In the course of his career Michael Jackson became a planetary pop music icon. His journey and, above all, what he showed in his music videos enable us to bring out two central aspects illustrating the impasse of the elaboration of adolescent processes overlaying a failure of the integration of the genital body : the failure of the sex-differentiated encounter with an underlying phobia of women and the fetishization of the body through the choice of isolated organs as a way of preserving the omnipotent infantile body associated with the disavowal of castration.

Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 995-1004.

Jacques Dayan : depressiveness and depression

There is a tendency in the systemic psychiatry of mental states to consider periods of sadness or persistent discouragement in the adolescent, or even just morose states, as signs of pathology. Following the theories of D. W. Winnicott, E. Gut, P. Fédida and Ph. Gutton, we develop the dynamic viewpoint according to which the depressive movement that is inherent to mental life plays a part in the regulation of psychical life. Set in motion by loss or abandonment, it fosters the redistribution of investments, a veritable « re-affectation ». The depressed adolescent subject needs to be accompanied, not immediately treated. Although the outcome of adolescent depressiveness is usually favorable, we will examine some possible harmful outcomes, calling depression in such cases « unproductive », « death depression » or « depression of unbinding ». Two emblematic pathological figures, mental anorexia in the young girl and addictive conducts, are seen as resistances to depressiveness, which is nonetheless a key part of a process of integration. These illustrate, following the example of the dismantling of thought in psychotic depressions – desperately expressed in artistic productions – the essential role that the body plays as a constituent and a means of psychical life.

revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 737-745.

Alejandro Rojas-Urrego : just call me love and i’ll be rebaptized

The state of being in love in adolescence often takes on the form of passion and the accents of tragedy. It is also as much feared as sought after, not only as re-encounter and repetition, « republishing of old news » as Freud writes, but also as a new discovery, creative dynamism, transforming invention. Henceforth it represents a second baptism, a new birth which must sometimes disavow the first. To love is to be reborn. To undo oneself, in order to redo oneself in a better way, to recreate oneself. At the risk, of course, of losing oneself forever. The state of being in love in adolescence demands the psychoanalyst’s attention. Clinical experience sometimes confronts us with psychical breakdowns in the wake of romantic disappointments. They reveal the quality of the narcissistic foundations of the adolescent whose identity is suffering. More a reviviscence than a reminiscence. In such situations, where representations are lacking to us, literature can be a big help. It can enable us to put into words a story which has none. Using Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the author suggests several possible lines of interpretation of love in adolescence involving notion of the sexual body, narcissism, death, orgasm, name.

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 683-705.