Medical progress in the field of procreation and the near-total autonomy they give to conception lead us to revisit Francoise Héritier’s theory about « the differential valence of the sexes ». What is happening with the relative dependence of women compared with men in France today ? The developments observed over the last twenty years, both in fertility techniques and in new family arrangements, tend to reveal new inequalities between men and women in their respective relations with sexuality and parenthood. So the appearance of new models of procreation, exemplified by lesbian couples, will introduce the elaboration of a new fantasy of origins : the subject will gain access to symbolization much more through his certainty of being his parents’ « child of the desire for a child » than through the working of a fantasy of the primal scene.
The adolescent who risks getting lost in his own reflection or in that of others he bears is thus both on a quest for images and under the control of the past. Some forms of control are direct and quite obvious, others are parallel or lateral – among siblings, for example – or sometimes farther back in the ancestral line. Along with the question of an anthropology of adolescence, we propose to approach the quiet transformations inherent to adolescent processes and the insidious installation of figures that partly obscure the field of representation. We will try to show that though these figures sometimes set the subject in a dynamic of unending mourning, they will in the end contribute to structuration, and therefore have a positive influence on the adolescent process.
Adolescence, a recent category peculiar to the West, tends to disunite puberty as a universal physiological event. It is not so much the disappearance of rites that is in play here, as the extenuation of the bond of solidarity between the phenomenon of puberty and the social designation – and treatment – of adolescence. Using the example of self-harming practices in adolescence, I would like to hypothesize an increase in acts/symptoms is fed by this separation and tends, paradoxically, to reduce it – i.e., reassert a social and private recognition of identity of the forms of otherness engaged by puberty – and at the same reject these same forms of otherness.
This article discusses the hypothesis that, in contemporary society, the Oedipus complex is more complex but still exists as a central organizer of the psyche. A debate with anthropological views – in particular with avec Françoise Héritier and her theory of « incest of the second type » (between a mother and daughter who have the same lover) – leads to a re-problematization of the notions of primary homosexuality, intersubjectivity and thirdness. Thus the issue of differentiation can be better conceived in relation to subjectivation : does incest hold the risk of a psychotizing undoing of differentiation ? What about psychical disorders in adolescence marked by phenomena of regression towards group situations dominated by borderline functioning ? The identical evoked by Françoise Héritier does not totally correspond with narcissistic libidinal economy. It is necessary to revive the historic dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology (A. Green and J. Lacan with C. Lévi-Strauss, and more recently, the exchanges between M. Godelier and B. Juillerat), starting with a reflection on the paternal function today, extending the critical discussion of the theory of incest of the second type, and an example of a traditional society without fathers and contemporary neo-parenthood. It would appear that the oedipal triangle can take various forms.
After a general introduction to the Colloquium of October 5, 2012 at the Collège de France, the author proposes the fundamental anthropological concept of adolescence. Two formative processes involved in its creation are the pubertary and the infantile. The processes of adultness are the repetition, recollection and elaboration of infantile neurosis. In anthropological terms, they represent established order. The situation is explored from the perspective of the encounter – critical, and perhaps constructive and founding – between the pubertary undergoing sublimation and adultness.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 11-21.
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