Catherine Chabert : The Past : A Passive Form ?

Using clinical fragments and meta-psychological reflections, the author advances some working hypotheses which tend to show how, in adolescence, compulsive symptomatologies aim to stop time by means of a major counter-investment of passivity. By actively refusing the effects of absence and of loss on the one hand, and those of the castration inherent to indentificatory processes on the other hand, these adolescents attempt to annul the passage of time and the changes it bears witness to.