“Radicalization” emerges in parents’discourse as a reason for seeking consultation for their children. In three clinical situations, it appears as a form of mediation used by adolescents to separate themselves from their parents and fill up a void in the transgenerational. “Traumatic racial mixing” is discussed as a factor in the identity process. The aim of this article is to understand the meaning of these radical engagements with the context of separation and individuation.
Tragedy, which was born in Athens in the 5thcentury B.C., is characterized by its representation of reality’s problematic nature. In adolescence, the solving of sexuality’s enigma enables one to invest the idea that conflicting forces determine human behavior. By discovering the tragic dimension of existence, the adolescent can become aware of the perverse maneuvers that take us from the register of ambiguity to that of paradox and can commit an act of denunciation.
Significant and longterm contact with incarcerated female patients who have been “radicalized” leads to a hypothesis that espousing jihadist ideology may be the only way for these young women to bandage the wounds of an accident-filled family history. Once enthralled by this idealist dogma, they seem dispossessed of their thought activity and of the very essence of their subjectivity, to the point where they fuse with the sacred ideal and the radical doctrine.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 2, 243-252.
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