Compared with their male peers, girls commit few delinquent acts. But crimes and misdemeanors are not the only expression of violence and transgression that girls must deal with, either actively or passively. The various forms raise the question of whether certain modes of violent or non-violent transgression are specific to females and how they should be handled by the social welfare and judicial systems. This semiological puzzle is an open field for new research.
This article explains one of the objects of study of the author; the homosexual process of psychic development.
Such a process includes the double of the self, the primary and preoedipal homosexualities as well as the construction of the fantasy « the female relation with the father » in adolescence (oedipal homosexuality). A clinical example (the extreme femininity of a 15 year old adolescent) illustrates the reflection on the construction and the continuity of the homosexuel process.
The impassioned movements of transference are illustrated by the presentation of a cure of an adolescent girl suffering from spina-bifida.
Hate of her pubertal body, fear of not feeling loved, badly experienced secondary identifications are condensed into an impassioned transference as an image of a femininity aspired by homosexuality, between rejection and idealization.
Using the conceptualization of Bonnet and the story of a sixteen year-old girl pushed to commit rape upon the person of another girl, several ideas can be brought forward regarding the specificity of remorse in adolescence and its impact in triggering violent acts.
If remorse is inscribed very early in the history of the subject, transmitted through filiation and taken up according to the subject’s place in the generational order and his own life experiences, adolescence gives it even more weight, insofar as the subject is pressed by his pubescent body into bringing out fantasmatic family pacts which imprison him in order to accede to a genital identity. Remorse in adolescence signals, for the adolescent, the impossibility of using his sex as an excuse, and attests to his enclosure in an impasse between primary identification with the active and almighty mother and the secondary, Oedipal, identification. Running up against the newness of genitality, remorse may lead the subject to the passage to the act, that crazy moment of the remorse overflowing which paradoxically signals both the subject’s incapacity to get on the way to the accomplishment of puberty and his ultimate attempt, a vain and desperate one, to once again become the subject of his history. And if this act fails in its liberating aims, perhaps it can permit the subject, supported by the transferential bond, to begin to speak again.
Commercial exploitation of high-level sports added to its ideological role seems to have induced a sort of angelic group blindness. However, the dangers brought on by the worship of organized performance and by the logic of rational productivity are now damaging an ever-younger population. In some sports, anorexic behavior among young athletes has become the norm. The aim of this article is to contribute to the identification of vulnerability factors, whether they be individual (dispositional factors) or context-linked (situational factors), which induce fatal behavior in the adolescent gymnast.
As virile ideology dominates in sporting environments, the refusal of all that is feminine constitutes a crucial paradigm in the drive evolution of the adolescent and her relational environment.
Following the 1955 publication of Nabokov’s novel, “ physically attractive, flirtatious young girls giving the impression of ingenuous naïveté ” (Petit Robert dictionary) are indifferently designated by the terms lolita or nymphet : potential women whose bodies have yet to undergo the upheavals associated with motherhood. A nymph also designates the chrysalis of certain insects whose larvae, while undergoing a transformation into a reproductive creature, conserves its juvenile characteristics. What might be the meaning of this connection between prepubescent “ innocent ” femininity and an inferior animal such as an insect ? The analysis of certain works of science fiction may provide the key.
Sexual abuse in the family setting of some adolescent authors seems to demonstrate a problem in distinguishing what there is of femininity in the maternal object. Here we try to study this factor specifically :
– The act corresponds to a “ release ” of the protection ensured by the maternal imago and/or a higher bid to appropriate the adolescent’s body or mind as an enjoying or distressing object.
– The act responds to a hole in symbolic ideas defined by the law, this hole concerns the “ biological rock ” of castration, of which sexual difference is a calling signal.
Starting with the postulate that the sexual revolution of the sixties brought about what M. Tort calls « the end of paternal dogma », we suggest that the suburban slums be viewed as enclaves of resistance against the end of an erotic inequality in which the male has the advantage. Beyond the fact that control of femininity is a shared value, virginity continues to considered as sacred, a guarantee of family honor, in the suburban housing projects, while a pervading post-modernity moves towards less difference between the sexes. This clash between two symbolic universes thus increases the conflicts inherent to the delayed action effect of the adolescens process. We will consider that the refusal of the feminine in the adolescent girl and the hatred of the feminine in the adolescent boy result from the same translation of puzzling messages received from the adult other, integrating female sexuality as potentially dishonoring and always dishonorable, and also from a human environment that is « not good enough » to transmit the ways of access to symbolization.
Frederico Garcia Lorca’s drama « The Bernarda Alba’s home » unveils the life of five girls plunged by their mother into an eight years mourning. Adela, the youngest daughter will begin a violent fight against her mother which will seal her femininity’s fate. The central question has to do with the vagaries of the bipartition of the subjectivation between continuity and change.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 665-671.
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