Using an encounter with an adolescent girl who committed an act of violence directed at the face, this article will discuss the role of the face and that of the disfiguring movement in the sexuation process of the adolescent girl. In its continuity with the body, the face is subjected to the violence of the pubertary process and to the demands of the work of the feminine. Failure to integrate a sexually differentiated face can lead to anxieties of disfigurement and defenses relating to the face, or else to acts of disfiguring violence.
We propose to analyse a category : the “ obscene ”. We define this category as a function : in the space of the relationship with the other, it plays both a regulating and a parading role, as a way of being in front of the other, while struggling against his/her fascination.
Adolescents, in their relationship with the “ pornographic scene ”, question the body of the other, which is experienced as an object of attraction but also of danger.
Relations between the adolescent process and one’s relationship with language are played out through a certain « remodeling » of language, by way of adolescents’ graphic inventions and their new investment of written forms. In the invention of his signature we posit an essential act of rewriting of the adolescent by himself, in other words, the acquisition of a style. It is a question of investigating the changing status of the subject in relation to the signature joined to his proper name. This no doubt involves specifying the monstrative function of the signature and the effects of its displacements. We would suggest as a line of research a study of the signature-value of the marks of the subject in their actual formations: inscriptions on one’s own body.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 1013-1021.
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