We have discussed the issues and limits the adolescent faces in managing his body through the use of an avatar in on-line games and communities. If the avatar may first appear very limited to us in the figuration of the real body, these limits finally seem to help the adolescent filter the pubertaire’s access to these virtual worlds, to make it into a place of narcissistic restoration, at the cost of drive activity that must other outlets in this universe.
This article aims to articulate two theoretical and complementary approaches to adolescence: fantasy and its recasting on the one hand, and the adolescent “ sinthome ” on the other hand. We’ll start off with the concept of the “ sinthome ” in J. Lacan’s theory and its specific use in the logical moment of adolescence. Then we’ll consider what we have named “ the recasting of adolescence ”. It is indeed a conception of adolescence fantasy (the specificity of the rhomboid – which Lacan calls the “ awl ” – in the matheme) which will enable us to find the primary foundations of the construction of the “ sinthome ”. By showing how close the function of the “ sinthome ” is to that of fantasy, this theory leads into new avenues regarding the psychopathology of the adolescent and, moreover, into the direction his treatment should take.
The author argues that, according to their degree of omnipotence and their degree of ego identification, manic defences (Klein, 1934) can either open or close access to bisexuality that is harmonious enough to preside over one’s passage through psychical puberty. This study starts off with historical and metapsychological references relating to the fundamental concepts of melancholy, mania and manic defences. Afterwards, the author links the title concept of manic defences to Œdipal conflicts and conflicts over dependence and separation, all of which are inherent to psychical puberty. In so doing, he differentiates, insofar as these conflicts are concerned, their pathological stumbling blocks from the turbulences they ordinarily stir up. In the course of the article, there is a specification of the bonds of interdependence that psychical puberty and manic defences conjointly maintain with the notion of dependencies – normal, mixed, or negative – and the feeling of sexual identity, of belonging to one sex or the other.
We don’t know what we are encountering in someone we encounter. Is it a first meeting, or a reunion ? The encounter may involve chance, a coincidence. It may be a challenge for the gambler looking for an encounter at the very limit of his destiny.
For Freud, every meeting is a reunion. Whether it take place in the expectation of belief or that of the transference, it is always a re-encounter with an object, a lost Other. Repetition compulsion drives each person to find again the maternal in order to restore lost happiness and escape from disarray and the “ uncanny ”.
With the analytic treatment, the compulsion to repeat is above all a refusal to recollect, that is to untangle the past from the scene of present reality. The analyst is not there in propria persona : his role is to enable an encounter with the past, in order to send the past back to the past and be able to live the present.
The author, chief reporter on religious affairs for the newspaper “ La Croix ”, paints a picture of the religious world of young people today. Adolescents, who are rather uninformed about religious matters, tend to develop spiritual curiosity without actually belonging to any religion, “ off the beaten track ”. However, for some of them real conversions may occur at this period in life. One should also note the success of rallies such as World Youth Day, where the young can experience a more emotional, warm and festive form of religious practice.
The clinical treatment of cult-induced alienation shows that the latter has to do with impasses of identification in adolescence. The deferred-action of the cult instrumentalizes, within the logic of incestual control, the subject’s narcissistic weaknesses, responding with perverse seductiveness to his demand for recognition.
In mystical ecstasy, the experience of the encounter with the object is not like the tranquil satisfaction of a reconstitution, of a restitution ad integrum, even at the cost of a certain tension like that described by Plato when the two halves of the primitive androgyne get back together, but much more like a passionate embrace. Man does not find his divine part again; he becomes possessed, a stranger to himself, and it is precisely upon this strangeness that he bases his belief in transcendence.
This article shows how the Freudian reduction of mysticism to a regression to primary narcissism can be placed in perspective and extended through a consideration of the sublimatory dynamic animating certain great mystical figures, and the amorous interpersonal dimension of their life of faith. It shows Freud’s understanding of mysticism, in its difference from religion, and considers contributions by other authors such as C. Parat, S. de Mijolla-Mellor, and A. Vergote.
The spiritual exercise becomes a narcissistic strategy when brooding over one’s own wrongdoing leads to ecstasy ! This (fusional) narcissism of indifferentiation and the narcissism of differentiation (such as that of little differences) re-characterize the sin in the opposite sense, by being only indirectly interested in the sexual or aggressive wrong done to the object. We find these strategies in adolescence among the offspring of the New Age, often drug-addicted, and in certain behaviours.
This article tries to combat received ideas about the “ mystical experience ” and to resituate it within the history of the person who lives it in order to show its possible creativity. After an evocation of the “ burning bush ”, the story of Edith Stein will be examined in order to show how her encounter with Christ, if she is recounting the facts of her experiences, opened up a future to her, giving her access to another apprehension of the world: conflicts that had until then been irresolvable find a possible resolution in an atmosphere of paradoxes, helping to reduce splitting and move from the constraints of a controlling relation to another kind, wherein the human truth of abandonment is discovered.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 117-129.
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