At a time when the practice of the selfie is spreading like wildfire, the presentation of self-portraits created by two young artists (Francesca Woodman, Zhang Huan) will attempt to shed light on the way that these creations can contribute – by capturing the disquiet, the tension that is proper to the pubertary – to the subject’s ability to appropriate metamorphosis for use in subjectalisation. Engaging in such a creative process is never without risk, particularly the risk of breakdown or self-destruction.
The study of a particular category of horror movie, the slasher, draws us onto the stage of the adolescent experience, both in terms of its content and its form. The skeleton of the uncanny and its syncopated temporality offers one a glimpse of a common unconscious issue. The adolescent finds a solution for how to represent and elaborate the central issue of the feminine in the identifiable figures of killer and victim. The slasher movie as a vehicle for a degraded initiation rite is a resource for the adolescent facing the upheavals of puberty.
In the course of his career Michael Jackson became a planetary pop music icon. His journey and, above all, what he showed in his music videos enable us to bring out two central aspects illustrating the impasse of the elaboration of adolescent processes overlaying a failure of the integration of the genital body : the failure of the sex-differentiated encounter with an underlying phobia of women and the fetishization of the body through the choice of isolated organs as a way of preserving the omnipotent infantile body associated with the disavowal of castration.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 995-1004.
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