The documentary The Black Roses subtly shows the complex relations of adolescent girls from the « north side » of big cities, with their language and their sex. Though this provocative language sometimes acts as a factor in social exclusion, it can equally reinforce the bond between couples and allow the subject to manage her multiple identities. At the intersection of differences between sexes, ages, and various kinds of territories – cultural, psychical, political – the use of this mixed language makes possible the creation of an intermediary space, located between languages and between places.
The authors study the function of the gaze and its clinical issues in the adolescent’s confrontation with the Real of the sexual by means of two clinical cases in which the gaze crystalizes trauma after the confession of a sexual transgression to the Other.
The question of gender has moved to the forefront of politics and has even become an issue of culture, or indeed, civilization. It is stimulating to confront two types of extreme attitude towards anatomical sexual difference: that of J. Butler, extending the disavowal of anatomical difference and those of the rituals of excision and circumcision, which try to increase the difference by created an « enhanced reality ». Psychotherapies show how the adolescent’s problematic can meet with these same disavowals for internal reasons, not just cultural ones.
A few remarks about terminology (sex, gender, identity) will be followed by a brief review of gender identity construction up till adolescence. The passage from a sort of childhood androgyny to the fullness of sex-specific identity sometimes occurs with some common difficulties; this is also the moment when the possibility of accessing complete and fertile sexuality will confirm or develop sexual orientation. Outside of any problem of sexual development, some adolescents (transsexual) refuse the sex they were born with, which is their biological sex, and request hormone-surgical transformation. Some adolescents have a problem of gender identity related to a problem of sexual development. A « transgender » movement has arisen in our culture, calling gender into question and going so far as to refusing all sexual distinction; this raises questions which are not medical but societal.
Idealization is considered to be among the three components of human love : « excitation, idealization, affection ». This contextualization helps us to understand better the complex and contradictory issues of the ideal. Hope is also tied to love. In descriptive terms, hope places in the future the object of love and primary satisfaction lost forever in the past. In this forward, progradient movement it seems possible to find it again in a vanishing point that recedes eternally, always out of reach. According to Freud, hope is « the hope of hallucinatory reunion with the lost object of satisfaction ». Following Freud, the author proposes a phenomenology and a metapsychology of Hope, which entails a theory of the hallucinatory, raising it to the level of a concept. A clinical example links ideal and hope: hope is born from the diminution of an idolatrous idealization. This disappearance of the hope of loving and being loved leads to despair and, in the end, death.
This article deals with the issue of the « mother » tongue of the female child in exile and her bond with the mother during the pubertary process. This is a theoretical and clinical rereading of the case of an adolescent girl who spoke of the loss of her « momma » tongue in relation to the clinical work.
The image of a chain of paper dolls comes to mind to help the clinical psychologist working in a juvenile detention center to envision adolescents caught in a chain marked by the fraternal, the horizontal, and the norm. The author presents his practice in the prison itself: the displacement of the psychologist towards the adolescent in his incarcerated condition, with the interposition of a clinical setting. This can open the way for the adolescent towards a work of psychical differentiation and subjectivation. A clinical illustration bears witness to an adolescent’s journey in the encounter with the psychologist, from the « we » to the « I », with a chessboard turning out to be an important object in this case.
Our experience in adolescent homes, Maisons des adolescents (MDA), has enabled us to theorize the practice in a multidisciplinary setting. This practice, called « taking care », involves a number of paradoxes, which are considered risks for failure, but which administrations, services and professionals must nevertheless use to help the most troubled adolescents.
The adolescent passage is paradoxical. On the one hand, the young person positions himself as a subject by and for the rupture with the domestic cultural universe ; on the other hand, he will often return to repressed cultural elements of the preceding generation in order to construct his future. This is a sharp and very visible paradox when we are dealing with contexts of migration, but it is inherent to every adolescent process, whether « migrant » or « native ». This article uses C. Lévi-Strauss’ notion of « mythopoetic language » to explore the translations of this paradox in adolescents’ particular way of modeling language and of speaking.
The adolescent process is part of a movement towards huminization. This article explores the possibility of linking the emergence of the pubertary to the register of hominization, recalling the association between adolescence and the acquisition of tools, articulated language and walking upright. This correspondence helps highlight the influence of the element of surprise with regard to the outcome, an outcome marked by the determining importance of creation. What is at stake in the re-crossing of the stage of verticalization, during the genital phase, once again shows the importance of the encounter and of the other in the heat of the adolescent passage.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 85-99.
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