Through a large number of psychiatric emergencies (540 under age 18 in 2001), we explore the relation between the passage to the act and the emergency situation in adolescence: doesn’t modern psychiatry tend to define a psychiatry of the act ? The latter depends on internal causes at adolescence, but also on the environment. The work with these situations is then defined both by the constitution of an emergency service as an interior setting and by the development of an exterior network. The evolution of a ward for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in adolescence can thus be described.
The author offers some reflections on the basis of experience in a general emergency psychiatric center, which each year receives 700 youths under the age of eighteen, and a reading of Henri Flavigny’s 1984 article on emergency responses to adolescence. The emergency is actually a societal phenomenon which worsens in times of crisis. This article treats the complex temporalities of adolescence and of the emergency, a process which is both intrinsic and environmental, which may or may lead to the emergency ward, just as an emergency may or may not be present in times of crisis. Paranoia is activated in this, and is sometimes the only way of questioning what is false when compromise is not possible. In this way the emergency appears as the receptacle for the impossible adolescence, when subjectivity is at an impasse. It is revealed in an unexpected way as a place for speaking and listening.
In the contemporary context, characterized among others by the shortage of roads drawn towards the empowerment, teenagers compete in originality to advance in any harmony with their society of consumption and image. Now, in spite of their absence of resistance, the imperative of assertion forces them to invest certain dimensions of the existence to be protected from the feeling of heteronomy. By investing the temporality, in particular by devoting to acts of desynchronization, by creating deliberately emergency situations and by provoking symbolic experiences of the ubiquity, young people redefine their reports in the temporal constraints which impose the rhythms of the collective life. The temporality appears then as a material of the autonomy.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 161-169.
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