The status of the spoken word, at the onset of adolescence, translates the contradictory identity movement out of which the « I »will be constructed. The identity idem and the identity ipse constitute the two poles from which the certitude of a subjectal definition is pronounced. An «I» that the adolescent questions by upsetting the rules of language, but also by choosing particular procedures to which the new modes of communication will enable him to give form.
Using a series of selections from a treatment, the author covers the conditions of this identity work in adolescence. It is, in essence, a self-construction. Lastly, the author insists on the importance of a psychical « aimless going » for which analytical therapy will appear as the natural matrix.
Since June 2007, a medical-psychological staff (UCSA-SMPR) has been practicing in the juvenile penitentiary of the Rhône-Alpes region. A psychiatrist and a psychologist propose to review this experience as a way of investigating temporal aspects of treatment and the issues specific to this institutional setting. What are the goals of treatment ? How should we conceive of the care-providers’ position within an incarcerating structure, where treatment is supposed to be an « auxiliary » to a repressive disciplinary system ? How can we enable an elaboration of the subject’s and the institution’s acts ? These reflections are at the heart of a practice wherein professional identity is often mishandled. Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 869-879.
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