Adolescence, transition usually constructive from the world of childhood to adult, is sometimes the origin of weakness because of puberty changes and revival of sex drives emergence previously sleepy. This movement is not always bearer of desirable vitality by confronting certain subjects to an impossible maturation, opening the prospect of suicide as an issue to this evolutionary impasse. An original light of what Freud has before developed about underlying mechanisms of some particular suicide attempts is proposed throughout the history of a patient whose repetition of suicide attempts inscribes adolescence in a tension between a mortified process aiming at her destruction and an attempt of survival in the ultimate appropriation of herself.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Et la mort? – 2010 T.28 n°2
FLEMAL SIMON, LEFEBVRE ALEX : AN IMPOSSIBLE WORK OF ADOLESCENCE : BETWEEN DEATH, DELUSION AND CREATION
Considering the psychic changes caused by this period, adolescence brings the pubescent individual to accomplish the double task of leaving archaic passions behind, and of experimenting new ways of drive satisfaction. In order to summarize this subjective involvement specific to the adolescent process, the authors suggest the concept of « the work of adolescence ». Based on a clinical case, the present report aims at examining the main properties of the work of adolescence. This analysis is based upon an impossible adolescence due to an archaic problem anchored in the psychic functioning of the subject. Through defence mechanisms developed, such as delusional emergence and artistic production, the work of adolescence is investigated in the case of a traumatic maternal encroachment which disrupts the dynamics of identity.
DI ROCCO VINCENT : « I DON’T WANT TO DIE BEFORE I’VE TASTED THE SWEETNESS OF DEATH. . . »
Beginning from an unusual clinical experience composed of fragments of improbable encounters with an adolescent going through a period marked by high-risk behaviour in a violent context before becoming an « extreme ski » professional ; I propose to study the question of death at adolescence… not as a reflection on loss and grievance, but as an essential figure of the unrepresentable which organizes high-risk behaviour during adolescence. With this approach, death reunites inevitable and random figures while confronting what is unrepresentable of one’s own death. Thus, we have a different reading of the classical approach to risk-taking, which commonly refers to the idea of ordealistic, high-risk behaviour as a narcissistic trial. Another approach considers risk-taking as an attempt to represent an intimate relationship with death and what is unrepresentable of one’s own death. This dynamic takes form in what may be called an instantaneous clinical moment, where what is experienced during the act cannot be resolved through the realization of the act itself. It is in fact the question of a chaotic attempt to express, by feeling, an experience which remains errant.
BERNATEAU ISEE: DIE FROM LOVE
Love and death, rather than fighting against each other, sometimes meet during adolescence. In Leonce and Lena from G. Büchner, the two eponymous adolescent heroes evocate death and its associated representations, the dead child or suicide, when they meet and fall in love. Death symbolises and sums up the threat of loss that the discovery of the genital object occurs. It is called by the adolescent in order to « refresh » and produce a anticathexis of an instinct whom he fears the incestuous coloration.
DUEZ BERNARD : NECESSARY DEATH AND SUFFICIENT DEATH : TWO FIGURES OF INITIATION IN ADOLESCENCE
The author analyzes the mechanism of suicidal constructions in adolescence. This conduct is an avatar of the initiatory fantasy of the return of the originary in adolescence : self-engenderment in the presence of at least one other person and its opposite, self-destruction in the presence of at least one other person. He shows how the adolescent summons the intruder into his psychical dynamic of scenality/obscenality by confronting at least one other person with the terror of death. If the other or others who are terrified remain present, the adolescent can think that despite the intrusive terror that fills him he remains human. In the case of the contrary, suicidal or murderous conduct can result. The entry into adulthood requires that the adolescent confront a necessary death, one which inscribes him as mortal, part of humankind ; and a death that is sufficient for him to go beyond eternal objects of infantile loves and be able to invest in bonds of desire with perishable love objects.
MORHAIN YVES: ADOLESCENT SPLEEN
Adolescence is a time of great vulnerability for identity because of internal turmoil caused by the eruption of puberty and real consequences for his psychic economy. This identity is inconceivable without a meeting must for any teenager with the question of death and its outcome. The author attempts to examine how a modern society mélancoliforme, the teenager, suffering from Baudelaire’s spleen, is testing its ability to survive the experience of confrontation with death that depends on its becoming psychic adult.
ROUSSILLON RENE : PRECARITY AND IDENTITY VULNERABILITY IN ADOLESCENCE
The author offers a theory of adolescence based on the necessary subjective revolution introduced by the emergence of the potential for orgasm linked to the biological maturation of puberty. But this is first experienced passively because it is « imposed » on the adolescent by biology. It is in the work of subjective re-appropriation the adolescent is then led to perform that we must place the adolescent’s relationship with death and the different forms that can be produced by the encounter with death. Confronted with the issue of death, the adolescent will mobilize the potential of the act in order to try to differentiate the psychical registers threatened with confusion by the contingencies of this encounter and try to set some limits by falling back on those of the body.