The myth of Perseus gives rise to thoughts on the psychical crossing of adolescence. The story is off to a good start with the prediction that Perseus will try to kill his grandfather. Because of this threat, Danäe is imprisoned by her father. The symbolic third party in the mother’s head makes it possible for the adolescent to bar the way to attempts at incest. Perseus’ challenge to the king and Medusa’s offering opens the way to the romantic encounter. Who can tell what the outcome will be?
This article focuses on new forms of passion derived from the potential for contacts between reality and the virtual, and the consequences of such contacts on the formation of subjectivation in adolescence. It will offer reflections on these new forms of “connected friendship” and discuss the risks of drifts into passion that could potentially block or render pathological the second process of separation-individuation.
Using two dreams of youth, those of H. Scliemann and of S. Freud, the author proposes to explore the nature of these and their role in the adolescent psyche, pointing out their link with the object’s flaws and the value of illusion during the period of adolescence.
This article will explore the theory conceived by Philippe Gutton with reference to the analysis of the beginning of the treatment of a fourteen year-old girl to show how, after some risky behaviors (anorexia. scarification) and several chaotic episodes in her relationships, a homosexual object choice, which had played out in the transference, turned out to be this young girl’s salvation.
A girl who undergoes passion believes that her feminine identity has been affirmed, as long as it is not recreational, that is, an escape. The effects of passion give rise to many trips to the clinician, not to provide a remedy (nor to calm or revive it, condemn or condone it), but rather to ensure that its form and ethics give the woman-subject access to a feminine identity, which is not to be confused with the maternal.
For adolescents whose lives are marked by many traumas starting at birth, it may happen that the onset of Passion – analogous to the suffering of Christ before and during his crucifixion – provides a solution. Using the clinical case of an anorexic adolescent girl, this paper will show how the body calls itself into question before the other, re-opening the fundamental question of desire.
Using two formats of the pubertary pictogram (infantile control and pubertary elaboration), it is possible to make a clearer distinction between passion and love. Passion is characterized by a double play of abuse of phallic power to the detriment of the new sexual and, in turn, “breakdown”. Love is a special instance of the intersubjectalisation necessary for adolescent creativity. At the frontier between these states, passion can be loving and love can be passionate. Two clinical examples will be taken from the novels of Hungarian author Sandor Márai.
The tectonic forces of romantic passion are evoked as after effects of the original human trauma: its distress, its inscription in language, its nostalgia for the fusion with and loss of parental ideals, its relationship with the Oedipal taboo… These are various ways of going “through the psychical looking-glass” that await the adolescent. This article will discuss the links between romantic passion, control, desire and the role of Kairos, of chance, of detail and partial objects, as well as emptiness and mourning affects, in the triggering of passion.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 1, 9-31.
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