The way one moves from the state of childhood to that of adulthood in the course of puberty has evolved very much throughout history. The body’s physiological changes have most often been correlated with the subject’s statutory and juridical change. One must observe that this is no longer the case and that, since its creation in the middle of the 19th century, adolescence keeps lengthening, to the detriment of the latency phase before it and of the accession to maturity after it. The difficulties this situation causes for adolescents should incite us to question it and suggest that the age of majority be lowered.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Rite – 2010 T. 28 n°3
GADEAU LUDOVIC : RELATION TO THE LAW AND THE EXERCISE OF AUTHORITY : DISCIPLINARY ACT AND TRANSITIONAL TIME
The author describes a drift in relation to the law and exercise of authority by setting education process and educational response. This opposition is useful to develop educational situations occurring in the vicinity of perversion. The educational responses would operate in the register of contingent reality. They respond to a temporality extemporaneous. The educational act would draw its structuring power of what lies primarily in the symbolic register. It would be governed by a transitional temporality. The author shows that certain intersubjective experiences, when they are subjected to a transitional temporality, give to the educational act its structuring impact.
JEAMMET NICOLE: RITE AND MONASTIC LIFE
Based on a study conducted in a monastery, this article examines the meanings that can be ascribed to liturgy and rituals: through the importance they attach to the body and their performance in a place shared by the Other and oneself, can they be seen as a portal to a transitional space?
NETTER MAURICE : THE RELIGIOUS AS EXPRESSION OF IMAGOS, OF THEIR FIXITY AND THEIR EVOLUTION
The religious as an expression of imago’s fixity and evolution. The religious expresses the inner world of each one seaking representability of his own colective origin. Imagos are representations of the linkings between inner inconscious perceptions and originary affects : they result from the memorization of what the very young children percieves from the « characters » of his environment and their relationship. The puberty starts the reviviscence of this characters whose phantasmatic relationships the adolescent will modify ; the religious can give a shape and a contenant to those imagoic recompositions ; as a passing through it may so lead to a bigger inner liberty.
JEAMMET PHILIPPE : RITES IN ADOLESCENCE
Initiation rites, among the most organized that exist, are characteristic of adolescence, with their emphasis on the body and everything related to sexuality. The rites are a means of confronting the threats that weigh on the subject and on the group. They are [performed/conducted] to sustain the subject and integrate him into the adult world. Their very ambiguity illustrates a paradoxal situation, that of the subject requesting what is in fact imposed upon him by others. They enable the co-creation of a common space of mediation by the group and the individual, thus avoiding the potential violence of a narcissistic clash over territories. Their meaning is expressed through performance but they open up the path to a shared trust, the bedrock of symbolization.
GUTTON PHILIPPE : THE FIRST COMMUNION
In the first part of this article I propose a reflection on the religious experience such as it is recounted by certain adolescents during the celebration of the « mystery ». I will then review succinctly the social order established by religion. In this confrontation between « subjective and objective rite », the second part of the article will show how it is necessary to situate their encounter at the deepest level which is that of otherness, that is, of the inter-subjectal bond. The argument will follow accounts by two writers on the mystery in question : that of F.-R. de Chateaubriand and that of A. Gide.
YAHYAOUI ABDESSALEM : RITES IN ISLAM IN ADOLESCENCE
After a short presentation concerning some rites in the Islam and arabic muslim’culture, we have tried to interpret the religious rites using by immigrant’adolescents. Immigrant’situation changes often the base’fonctions of rites and adapts them to the immigrant’context needs.
GILBERT MURIEL: JEWISH ADOLESCENTS BEFORE THE TRANSCENDENT LAW : THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL STAKES OF THE BAR-MITZVAH
The ritual ceremony of the Bar-mitzvah marks the Jewish adolescent’s religious coming of age. This article describes the ritual and attempts to elucidate the sense it embodies, the role it plays in the life of Jewish men, and the anthropological and psychoanalytical stakes it entails. While recalling the broad traits of Judaism, the discussion underscores the very particular status of the text in the Jewish religion and, consequently, the particular role of the transcendant law to which Jewish men submit at the moment of puberty. This has psychic repercussions on the identity of Jewish adolescents, whose affiliation with the religious community is determined by their parents when they are born, then assumed in their own name when they reach their religious majority.
ARENES JACQUES : THE CREATION OF RITES DE SUBJECTIVATION IN ADOLESCENCE
Subjectivation rites in adolescence are now taking on an unprecedented configuration, in a culture where initiation, religious in particular, is less oriented towards the transmission of content and aims at self-creation and the quest for meaning. This article proposes to analyze contemporary religious, or spiritual, rites of subjectivation in adolescnce which are more or less linked to communal space. These subjectivation rites constitute the general figure of self-creation rites, and of « self-uplift » at this age. This type of rite is deployed with a transitionality which is also an appeal to the other. The example of the spiritual journey of Etty Hilsheim, a young Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz in 1943 and whose journal has had a huge readership, illustrates this theme of rites of self-creation, especially through writing, within a context of the weakness of the rite’s object of reference, a context wherein the appeal to otherness remains nevertheless in operation
BOURGEOIS FRERE DANIEL: RITE AND SIGNIFICATION : ON SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS CONCERNING THE ESSENCE OF THE RITE
What does initiation mean in the vocabulary of Christian theology ? Is this word the equivalent of the initiation rites of ancient religions, whose first concern is to insert young people into the reality of adult social life ? Christianity offers another vision of this issue : initiation opens one to a new life, the Kingdom of God, and this is accomplished through the sacraments. By affirming this, the Church provides a key for evaluating the specific relationship between the present world (« nature ») and the irruption of the new world (the « Kingdom of God ») : nature is the sign of grace. Rupture as much as newness, initiation establishes a relation of otherness between the two domains, as a sign is entirely oriented towards the otherness of the reality that it must designate.