In the traditional societies of western Africa, every year nusmerous teenagers are appointed, ritually, by them peers to be applicants for immigration. The fulfillment of the « mission » which is assigned to them can succeed only in the price of a subjective appropriation of their fate.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 317-324.
In the daily life of children and adolescents, particular conducts may be noted : asphyxiation « games », aggression « games » and death « games ». In light of my regular experience with young people involved in these kinds of conducts, I propose some ideas about the processes at work. In the first part I will present these different « games » and the way they are frequently confused with other kinds of activity ; then I will describe the effect on thought processes and the object relation they imply.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 305-315.
Regularly, the literature concerned with delinquency during adolescence convenes the failure of the paternal authority as explication of transgressions of the social link. These are the hangovers of a theoretical tradition which has shown many times the effects of oedipal triangulation, paradigmatic of emotional and social relationships. Though, a part of clinic is now showing us the importance of the dynamics of exchange subjected to an order of parity, we can not overlook. Underlain by narcissism, it takes precedence over genealogy and gives to distances and proximities an assured function ; the one which will guarantee adolescent reciprocity and integrity, in fouding otherwise his values.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 293-304.
Violence is one of the most feared forms of human violence and also offers privileged ground for studying this violence in itself. For psychoanalysis, perversion is the psychical organization which most clearly illustrates how this desire for vengeance originates in the human psyche. Its aim is nonetheless paradoxical, as I tried to show in one of my recent books with the title : Perversion, vengeance as a means of survival (Bonnet, 2008). For if the perverse person has such an investment in vengeance, it is paradoxically in order to survive and to counterbalance another, deadly violence, fearsome in another way, which threatens him relentlessly from within. The perverse person counterbalances this death violence by investing every facet of vengeance and it is important to identify these in order to defuse the immediate dangers. Then we see that he invests this survival violence in two ways : either by taking them out on others, whom he transforms into survival objects, in the most serious perversions, when the subject is entirely steered by the dialectic of violence ; or else by investing against his will some facet of the violence in such a way that it is limited to its consequences for the other : this runs the gamut from Don Juanism to masochism and fetishism, and includes all the varieties of narcissism and voyeurism that are rampant today.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 281-291.
The possibility of psychanalysis in adolescence raises the question of the existance of psychoanalysis every time repression is secondary in the patient’s problematic. Using concepts of subjectivation and the subjectivating agent, this article proposes to describe the main principles of a possible practice of psychoanalysis with the adolescent.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 271-280.
Is there such thing as psychoanalysis of the adolescent ? Two points of view will be refuted, one which considers adolescence as the moment of repression after-the-fact and one which is frightened of the danger of enflamed passions in a two-person clinical situation. The history of theoretical elaborations about adolescence introduces one to a conception of the encounter between the psychoanalyst and the adolescent that can shed light on psychoanalytical practice with the adult.
The Freudian method of interpreting drive conflict and the transference is applicable with the adolescent, as is demonstrated by the treatment of a young adolescent presenting anorexic and addictive disorders. Here borderline ways of functioning correspond to contra-phobic projective defenses, repression being covered by splitting.
Some hypotheses are advanced concerning current adolescent and young adult pathologies (paradoxical recourse to forms of excitation meant to de-sexualize, externalization of psychical interiority) in a context of « civilization and its discontents ».
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 245-270.
I do not share the idea of deep-seated changes in adolescence – which is still a narcissistic crisis – nor in the psychoanalysis or psychotherapy of adolescents. However, the socio-cultural field has altered, and perhaps therapists are the first ones to feel the effects of this.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°2, pp. 231-235.
Metamorphosis establishes a paradoxical contradiction between originality and program, « hazard and necessity », disorder and order, difference and similarity, subject and subjection, making possible a reflection between sublimation and control. Also paradoxical is its happening in time, for the illusion of the pubertaire is creative insofar as there is oscillation between it and disillusion. Repeat R. Kaës’ fundamental adage whose paradoxical character cannot be missed : « The subject is first of all an inter-subject », the pubertary metamorphosis is in an exemplary way that of the inter-subject : it includes the other in its very procedure. There is no solitary structural change. The pubertaire is not a (re)finding of the object but a revelation of genital alterity
The « metamorphic contract » is singularly enlarged when it connotes the ongoing creation of a bond between subject and society, individual and group, singular discourse and cultural referent.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 171-189.
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.
The author suggests some lines of reflection about the mystery and phenomenon of death. One must indeed distinguish, as the Romans did, between mortalis, moribundus, moriens, and mortuus. This distinction is essential for enabling an organization of research on the intimate bond between conception, the primal, and the « ancient fear ». Relying also on clinical experience, the author points out that the concept of primary identification is essential to reading analytically the specific psychical activity that is called the work of trespass. The dying person does tend to form a last dyade with his caregiver, the last depository of the transference, along the model of the early relation with the mother.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 147-159.