In this article, the author uses Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves to explore the place of sensoriality in adolescence. By putting into perspective the particular qualities of Virgina Woolf’s writing, which has been characterized as sensorial, the article will try to shed light on the links between sensoriality, continuity of being, and the redeployments of identification and subjectivation of loss in adolescence, especially as seen in the relations between the protagonists and the key character of Perceval.
Using the treatment of an adolescent girl received in consultation for hallucinatory symptoms, we offer a reading of the patient’s subjective expressions from temporal perspective. We will base our reflections on the actualization of primary links where sensoriality may become a road leading to the conquest of subjectivation. Because of this, we will explore the role of the adolescent’s current environment as a support in this work.
The work of the negative in adolescence is here presented as contributing to alexithymia insofar as it entails an avoidance of a traumatic sensoriality. So adolescence may be understood not only as a reactivation of the Oedipus complex, but also as a risk of sensorial resurgence akin to that which occurs at the beginning of life. A treatment based on sensoriality is conceivable.
Helping young autists with new corporal feelings and their fluctuations during the passage through puberty opens up new ways of calming when there is impingement by the drives. The pubertary passage which gives rise to a sensory awakening in the lower body can also help to restart the construction of an unfinished corporal ego and subsequently make the autistic youth more likely to be spontaneously interested in the relation with other people.
On the basis of strange sensorial formations and theories that seem like delusions, this article will present the notions of “creation of paradoxical sensorial envelopes” and “fantasy theories of adolescence”. The reliance on sensoriality is neither a deficiency nor a regression, but rather a paradoxical creation, both protecting and persecuting, which enables the elaboration in the transference of repressed traces of the infantile sexual unconscious, joined with corporal and fantasy compositions proper to adolescence.
The process of adolescence involves readjustments of identity and identification necessitating work of psychization that is indispensable in ensuring a feeling of continuity. Its failure puts the subject at risk of being dominated by the “de-objectalizing function” of his psychical economy, thus preventing any living form of creativity and expression. The work of analysis may then proceed by way of the sensorial, using the displacement in the transference of unassimilated sensorial impressions, coming very close to the “body of the ineffable”, between impasse and creativity.
The adolescent process, through the unconscious readjustment that it entails, involves the integration of a new sensoriality that does not correspond to the symbolic order inherited from childhood, but corresponds to the arrival of the Feminine (Other sex) and the enjoyment of the Other. It is an effect of the pubertary real, a real whose outcome is a defining issue of the adolescent phase. How to move from this to an object caught up in reality, inscribed as the cause of desire and integrated into the obligations of the social realm?
Examining the case of an adolescent rapist and murderer post mortem, this article presents the failures of adolescent creation and the reappearance, in the form of monstrous acts of violence, of a devastated sensoriality from early childhood. Structural psychopathology is not enough to account for this case. Nevertheless, psychodynamic psychocriminality attempts to describe a language of body and act, a preliminary to a multidimensional “incarcerated” treatment which could perhaps help such subjects recover a part of their humanity.
This article will attempt to investigate the importance of the self-informing function of sensoriality in adolescence in its connections with dream work, of which figurability is an essential component. These reflections are supported by the narrative of the process of the treatment of an adolescent engaged in compulsive body-attacking conduct.
In light of what is called the clinical treatment of borderline states, the author investigates some notions inscribed within the relations between body and psyche, such as perception, the sensory, sensuality, representation, emotion, affect and auto-eroticism.
Particular importance is given to the place occupied by infantile sensuality in connection with the establishment of auto-eroticism, insofar as sensuality is most often confused with the sensory. These notions still represent a large part of the difficulties psychoanalytical research encounters today. They maintain a narrow relation with the drives’ sphere of influence, but the opposition that has often been asserted to exist between the sensorial-perceptive and the intellectual can no longer be defended.
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