Using “lockdown journals” kept by adolescents and young adults, which tell of families living together during the public health crisis and the associated lockdown, the author focuses on the adolescent’s room, its polysemics and the many and varied investments that it can be the object of during a time when an entire family is “cloistered”. Unease and resilience coexist and are characteristic of the “room culture” that is emblematic of hypermodernity.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 113-128.
This article will show what is at stake in the case of an adolescent who confines himself and methodically constructs a place of voluntary reclusion, the place of an asceticism, to the point of becoming a figure of burial on the verge of in-terment anxiety. The text will attempt to provide not so much the description of an ascetic arc – its deprivations, seclusion, and attacks on the body – as of the place where it happens, the place of the asceticism, where the family home is undone and covered up by a new space.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 103-112.
The nautical image of the doldrums that suggested by D. W. Winnicott to describe the period of adolescence illustrates the way that some patients are immobilized. The re-actualization of the Oedipal conflict, when it has not disappeared, will appeal to the Ego and mobilize narcissism. In a treatment center for adolescents, institutional psychotherapy associated with group treatment can help them start sailing again.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 91-102.
The confinement of adolescents is here considered here as a kind of psychic immobility that keeps the symptom from forming. The transference with its binding-unbinding movement enables regression, thus transforming the primordial sadism into erogenous masochism. The pleasure principle can then become a true guardian of psychic life.
Word, Cloîtré 2023 T. 41 n°1 5 mars 2023
Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly is a master class in the masochism and melancholy mobilized in the sacrificial behaviors that underlie confinement in adolescence. The authors show how, behind the figure of the naive and passive woman there is the active Madame Butterfly position that fights against separation. Melancholic identifications with the fallen father who committed suicide make it impossible to give up the lost object and obtain freedom in other way except by attacking oneself.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 63-79.
The author approaches different experiences of confinement in adolescence by way of a clinical situation and several operas. He examines the unique path of Bérangère, sequestered by her mother, and of Pamina, captive of the Queen of Night; also of Siegfried, prisoner of Mime and Tannhäuser and detained by the goddess Venus. These four situations are an invitation to different variations of the reordering of imagos that precedes the investment of substitute objects.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 51-62.
The tendency to retreat within the family space is a manifest tendency in adolescence. The end of childhood behind, with its “disbelief” in the parents, is marked by a hostile retreat into the enclosure of “his” room, at least until the sudden act of de-confinement takes place. The name of Alexis, one of the earliest saints, deserves to be given to a “complex” that provides a clinical paradigm: the saint finds a way to secretly infiltrate the father’s house incognito and lead a double life there, after having sought a wholesome Elsewhere outside of his family’s ideals. How can one not see in this a major fantasy of adolescence, one that is confirmed by Kafka’s Metamorphosis? It is troubling to find this reduced to a syndrome outside time and culture in the phenomenon of Hikikomori – the “self-sequestration” of Japanese adolescents – when it sheds light on the unconscious drama reconstituted here.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 37-49.
The author refers to The Metamorphosis of Franz Kafka as a transformation narrative, the story of puberty transformations in which the emergence of genital sexuality, the subjection of the body to the biological, and the permanence of infantile sexuality are combined. Usually, the fantasy of self-engenderment helps to connect these different constraints. The failure of this connection causes adolescents to feel that they have an uncontrollable and threatening body that must be kept confined.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 21-35.
The term “cloistered” calls to mind Marcel Proust: both the author himself and the “captive” woman that the narrator says he keeps cloistered, obliging everyone to constantly guess the other in order to escape him. In analysis, thinking that one knows what the other is thinking has taken another form: empathy. Owen Renick has invented a game that he calls “cards on the table”, which he sees as a collaboration between analyst and patient. The question is whether this a game doesn’t permanently “cloister” both of them within the transference.
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 11-20.