Expertises in mental health carried out at INSERM have given rise to many debates and have caused many problems. The author argues that the (pedo)psychiatric model should continue to hold an original place and presents new openings suggested along these lines for the elaboration of future collective expertises of INSERM.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Droit de cité – 2007 T.25 n°1
Gérard Bonnet: ideals in adolescence
Adolescent crisis as it is manifested today in the poor suburbs is often attributed to an “ illness of ideality ”. The author shows that it is not so much a lack as an excess of material ideals that prevents the adolescent from adhering to the universal values that would facilitate his integration. To show how evolution is possible, he analyses the film La promesse (“ The Promise ”), by the Dardenne brothers, wherein one can follow step by step this evolution in the process of conversion in the widest sense and analyze the important role played by reference to the maternal imago.
Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils : Republic and “ the school question ” : which legitimacy for a school crisis ?
Secularity, a correlate of the meritocratic project, was the instrument of a political construction of a Mitsein today in crisis. Secularity, as a principle of reasonable government of men, excluded neither violent solutions nor naturalist representations of the school trajectories. But School is today confronted with the “ pluralist time ”, with an increasing request for cultural and religious plurality. And this democratic School, under the apparent social and political neutrality which sign the secularist ideology, reverses the relation with the feeling of social injustice : the more the School seems open to the greatest number, the more school failure is perceived as the singular productions of individuals, whence this recurring feeling of individual and even family and social dishonor. This academic case is to be seized through the prism of the refusal of politics by the school institution. The school question, according to us, is today nourished by the sexual and ethnic and social inequalities faced by the institution itself.
Claire Maurice : adolescence in the poor suburbs : a new “ malaise ” ?
Many young people from the poor suburbs are going through many problems, both familial and social, which raise the question of a new form of adolescent malaise in our contemporary society. These young people are not always open to therapeutic work. This raises many specific questions about the necessity of inventing treatment arrangements halfway between the social and the therapeutic, a way of meeting these young people at the space-time frontier that defines them: the suburb, this intermediary zone where minority demands and identity deficits converge.
Jean-Pierre Klein: adolescents and creative violence
Discourse and attitudes in the face an adolescent’s violence in reaction to the violent transformation of the body which is imposed on him or her are themselves often a reaction within the counter-violence (the author enumerates the five usual traps), while a desiring violence can often generate works of fiction that will indirectly treat their problems, mixing the relation to the law of the father and the reunions with the mother’s song. The adolescent defines himself semiotically as a “ negative subject ”, declining the verbs “ want ”, “ ought ”, “ know” and “ can” in the negative. How the can “ creation as process of transformation ” help to re-establish oneself as the “ subject of a quest ”, in search of one’s identity under construction ? Can the experience of psychotherapy feed other practices, including those that don’t seem to be asking to be fed ? The author, a psychotherapist and dramatist, relates an experience with a writing workshop involving adolescents who have been expelled from middle school because of their behavior and their violent speech.
Stefano Bolognini : the bar in the desert, symmetry et asymmetry in the treatment of difficult adolescents
The author considers the opportunity of specific alternate moments of symmetric-asymmetric relationship (which are to be contained in a classic asymmetric frame) to facilitate analytical work, and to allow interpretations with an analysand who is usually afraid of dependence, hostile to the Super-Ego representatives, in need of non-declared containment and of a basic contribution to the Self cohesion, as the adolescent patient is.
The clinical history illustrates this specific way of working, quite different from the one commonly adopted in the analysis of adult patients.
For instance, the analyst must be able to temporarily renounce, sometimes for a long period, too frequent and brilliant interpretations that would underline the adult’s superiority, which is hard for the adolescent to tolerate.
Anne-Caroline Fiévet : contemporary urban french in youth radio programs
Every night between 9 pm and midnight, young people call radio stations for a chance to speak on the air, talk with the presenters and often ask their advice. Linguistic analysis of a corpus of these open microphone programs recorded from 3 national stations for young people, namely Fun Radio, NRJ and Skyrock show that contemporary urban French and its speakers are perceived differently depending on the three different radio stations. On Fun Radio, the speaker of contemporary urban French is stigmatised whereas on NRJ the numerous verlan words used by the presenter are used to appear cool and not to attract young people from the suburbs. Only Skyrock leaves the young people to speak freely and to participate in the diffusion of new words from contemporary urban French into the youth slang of the moment.
Jean-Pierre Goudailler : contemporary urban french : mirror language, language of refusal
In français contemporain des cités (FCC) – the contemporary French of urban low income housing projects, otherwise known as “ youth language ”, or “ project language ”, several types of linguistic formation tend to show that language varieties detected in French urban housing projects have a “ mirroring ” function in relation to what is generally observed in the French language : among other things, there are many words in verlan (backwards language) and there is apheresis at the expense of apocope. Such language behaviors are manifestations of the way the young – and the not so young – from the projects and the working class neighborhoods of France are rejecting the language legitimized by school and by French society. It is one of their ways of reacting to the social violence being carried out against them.
Henri Cohen Solal : youth welcomed in the city
The establishment of living spaces for youngsters in poor neighborhoods, which have a fundamental rule of non-exclusion, raises thorny questions about the social and cultural treatment of their life together. What tools do we have for managing this ? How do we use the energies drawn from our desire to do good ? How to we imagine the training of an educator that would answer the challenge of unconditional acceptance ? In Jerusalem, the creation of youth centers with their rules for living, under the aegis of the Beit Ham association, shows us a singular and sometimes stuning experiment where the cultural object often serves as a hyphen bridging the gulf between people.
Olivier Douville : on “ ethnicized ” withdrawal in excluded adolescents
This article crosses psychoanalytical and anthropological perspectives in order to analyse the logics of social fractures in adolescence when these are experienced and legitimized in terms of “ ethnic ”or “ racial ” fractures. These demands are made into the symptom of a serious rupture in the assemblages between otherness and identity. The fate of many young people, though dedicated to entering into a shared, secular world, is here envisaged as a response to a logic of segregation.