Using the conceptualization of Bonnet and the story of a sixteen year-old girl pushed to commit rape upon the person of another girl, several ideas can be brought forward regarding the specificity of remorse in adolescence and its impact in triggering violent acts.
If remorse is inscribed very early in the history of the subject, transmitted through filiation and taken up according to the subject’s place in the generational order and his own life experiences, adolescence gives it even more weight, insofar as the subject is pressed by his pubescent body into bringing out fantasmatic family pacts which imprison him in order to accede to a genital identity. Remorse in adolescence signals, for the adolescent, the impossibility of using his sex as an excuse, and attests to his enclosure in an impasse between primary identification with the active and almighty mother and the secondary, Oedipal, identification. Running up against the newness of genitality, remorse may lead the subject to the passage to the act, that crazy moment of the remorse overflowing which paradoxically signals both the subject’s incapacity to get on the way to the accomplishment of puberty and his ultimate attempt, a vain and desperate one, to once again become the subject of his history. And if this act fails in its liberating aims, perhaps it can permit the subject, supported by the transferential bond, to begin to speak again.