Using my clinical experience in the world of high-level tennis, I will study adolescent players’ relation with eroticism and auto-eroticism through certain bodily and muscular movements that are repeated and sometimes associated with physical and emotional pain, in order to show the aspect of female masochism in this intensive practice of the sport. To shed light on the kind of masochism first theorized by Freud in 1924, I will try to make a distinction between the enjoyment and pleasure that may be experienced by the adolescent player who engages in tennis at a high level.
Both « creativity » and « inventiveness » are linked to newness, originality; however, one difference remains which is linked to the motivation and the pattern(s) that allows them to arise. The psychotic patient and the autistic patient may have an access to one or another, but not as a result of achieved sublimation. Sublimation – as a « specific aim » – is a quest for « a happy capacity of satisfaction of drive » or « a satisfaction of a drive in the change of its object, without repression », as J. Lacan expresses it in Ethics of Psychoanalysis – concerns pathologies in which the Other is considered as an object. In the expression « satisfaction of the drive » the whole sex drive theory is concerned. This will invite us to examine the moment when some autistic patients may be involved in the field of inventiveness but without any access to sublimation. The discussion will be open as far as the autistic patient’s capacity for representation is concerned.
Exploring love means facing up to the wounds it inflicts ; it means taking into consideration its cruelty as well as its tenderness and sensuality. Its possible consequence, sexual pleasure, will be looked here from the perspective of psychical reality, and the expression the this reality confers upon it in the Christian religion
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 873-884.
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