With second modernity, the construction of the meaning of a school system in the throes of de-institutionalization is no longer transcendent but immanent for pupils. The question of school experience and how students feel about their academic life needs to be raised. Our investigation leads us to posit that the feeling of academic suffering is becoming structural, albeit collectively disavowed. This article tries to shed light on the meaning of this collective disavowal and social « disappearing » of academic suffering, by the yardstick of contemporary social mutations, before setting up an ideal-typical typology of forms of pupils’ academic suffering.
In order to respond adequately and quickly to teenagers’ behavioral troubles, not only the way of acting, but most of all the meaning of what we do must be considered.
Indeed, it is the meaning which forces the responders to keep at their disposal a variety of solutions : non-psychiatric, non-medical « crisis centers » are some of these ; they should be organized at social and community level. Others responses are « Psychiatric Emergency Units ». However, these structures should not work on their own, but must be linked with all the units of a « Psychiatric Intersector ».
If our urgency answers respect the meaning of the adolescent’s question asked by his behavioral troubles, they can be efficient, and the crisis times can represent a positive contribution to his evolution.
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.
This article discusses the idea that the concept of responsibility for Self has for several generations been a dominant representation of the relationship between the individual and the socius. One of the principle hypotheses put forward by the author is that the (relative) irresponsibility of the Self is associated with the extent of its delegation of its protection of itself to the state. These modifications would then echo the socio-economic transformations and cross over, as we will show, into the field of the human sciences. They manifest themselves, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, in an evolution of the complaint and the greater emphasis on « narcissistic » disorders. It is still uncertain whether these transformations have a consistent affect on adolescent behavior beyond the role it seems to have regularly played : that of a social integrator, a ferry from one generation to the next.
For society and its representatives, « youths from lower class neighborhoods » overwhelmingly stand for social risk. They are perceived as a single entity in the register of social deficit or danger. In this article, we show how this attitude on the part of institutions and their representatives has the effect of placing adult worries at a distance, but does the same thing to subjective relations with youngsters. In order to recover trust and create new subjection processes for young people, we offer, with reference to work carried out in municipalities, to open up new perspectives for encounter and action, based on their desire for recognition and for a shared future.
That the sociological coordinates of a certain state of uncertainty forces us to undertake a hermeneutic effort focused on a subjectivity that is meant to become public, and that, giving in to the movement of interiorizing responsibility, we are freed from the guilt that hampers both our acts and our action, the observation made by A. Ehrenberg about contemporary work on adolescence. Though promising, it seems to pass over the more painful aspects, such as guilt anxiety, whose counterpart is the work of fantasy.
Subjectivation, which is characteristic of the psychical work of adolescence, is first of all an appropriation by the subject of his body and his thinking. This psychical work is paradigmatic of the social beliefs that we share : symptoms and even more psychical defenses, incontestably evolve over time, apart from the unconscious which may be conceived of as outside time. Thus, symptomatic expression is constantly caught up in the evolution of social values.
In this article, the epistemic confrontation between psychoanalysis and the social sciences is re-problematized using the arguments of A. Ehrenberg (and other researchers in sociology) and hypotheses about the specificity of the current discontent in the civilization. Freudian ideas are brought to the point where their subjectivism paradoxically introduces a perspective of renewing historicity. Current forms of discontent in civilization (contradiction between morality and cynicism, complementary relation between individualism and gregariousness, sexual liberation masking a lack of satisfaction, suspension of judgment, prevalence of functioning based on primary processes, violent acts, disorders of subjectivation) are depicted and commented upon.
« Discontent in society » is less a point of departure than a problem that needs to be elaborated and clarified. The author suggests replacing the individualistic ideal that society causes psychical suffering be replaced with the sociological idea that psychical suffering is today an obligatory, that is, expected, way of expressing of social suffering. This leads him to the hypothesis that in the area of mental health, we are witnessing a generalization of the use of personal idioms to give form to and resolve conflicts in social relations. These language games consist of making a connection between personal unhappiness and disrupted social relations using the yardstick of psychical suffering, thus bringing together individual suffering and shared suffering. From there, he develops the hypothesis that, obscured by the malaise, a equality crisis is being played out in the French style, that is, a crisis of an equality that is conceived essentially in terms of protection, and a protection in terms of status, according to the model of public functioning, while today’s equality, and thus the struggle against social inequality, is played out in terms of capacity.
The objective of this working day with A. Ehrenberg Going is to go back to the theses of La Société du malaise (2010) in the field of adolescence and youth. The individual must not only rely on his personal capacities, in particular his competence, but also on « his subjectivity, his inwardness ». « Individual (“ liberated ”) subjectivity is at the forefront. »
We would suggest that the author’s methodology not refer exclusively to character disorders, as is usually done, but toadolescence as a set of processes of creation and a well-known high point in the process of narcissistic individuation. How does the duel, united movement of de-institutionalizing and psychologizing social relations cause adolescents to suffer, perhaps in an exemplary way, in their supposed normalness and in their contemporary pathologies ? How does this evolution change youths in return ?
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 545-551.
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