The rite is a social act which is programmed and repetitive. The ritual is a sum of organized gestures and words which when spoken, are above our means of human understanding. The rite is a symbolic act which allows each one of us to find a place as a subject in relation to the world and one owns world. The sacrament is a meeting point between two aspirations and is concerned by all the questions regarding the teenage world : the wish of God to share his life with man and the wish of man who acknowledges that he is meeting God and will confirm it by a gesture in that case the Confirmation.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Rite – 2010 T. 28 n°3
LECUIT JEAN-BAPTISTE : THE INITIATION TEST IN RITES AND CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT
Initiation rites most often pertain to adolescence. They follow a scheme of death and rebirth, which entails a physical test. The Oedipus complex and its reactivation in adolescence are key to its interpretation. The sacramental rites said to be those of Christian initiation have this same initiatory structure. The testing part of it is absent, but may be found in the believer’s existence, insofar as this is where what is inaugurated by the sacraments of initiation is deployed. Far from spontaneously satisfying infantile expectations, Christian development calls for a deep transformation of desire, a demanding disillusionment. Here we can speak of an initiatory test, corresponding to the passage, which can always be deepened, from infantile belief to filial subjectivity. This transformation follows a dynamic analogous to adolescent subjectivation.
FALQUE ODILE : MICHELE AND THE CONFIRMATION
The sacrament of Confirmation is one of the three sacraments together with the Christening and the Eucharist which builds the Christian initiation in the Catholic Church. This was the concern of a young teenager who went for psychoanalysis and it occurred that the religious Rite was actually questioned in its interaction with the process of young adulthood. On one hand, the confirmation can be seen as a symbolic act because of the reference to the Holy Spirit and in the fact that it includes some special gestures and words which will allow the confirmed to be integrated into the Christian community. This marks a maturation of the Christian faith. It allows the Confirmed to make its own appropriation of the questions of life, death and find his (or her) identity. It also marks the position of the confirmed in relation with his (or her) forefathers. It brings a support by the representatives of the same faith who are passing this inheritance. This sacrament can also bring new responsibilities. On the other hand, it does not take into account the physical transformations in the teenager who has to integrate his or her gender. After all, it seems that it is set in ideal world.
BONNET GERARD :RITUAL EXHIBITIONISM IN QUESTION
Should the rite necessarily exhibit itself, at the risk of provoking those who do not share the same convictions and inciting violence ? Before answering the question, one must first recall that the rite is a sexual practice in the sense psychoanalysis gives sexuality. It is to ideal sexuality what coitus is to genital sexuality, and pleasure of the anal or oral type is to pre-genital or drive sexuality. This is why the symptomatic practice which is closest to the group rite and which is most able to illuminate it profoundly is not obsessive practice or the behavior of the masses, but perverse practice. The analogies between this and the rite are indeed striking, and many ritual excesses are equivalent to forms of perversion : this is the case of exhibitionism, of which there is so much talk nowadays. The surest way to avoid such overflowing is to push the comparison between the two practices as far as possible, and restore to the rite its own signification, which is to be speech enshrined within codified practice.
CORNALBA VINCENT : THE ADOLESCENT CONVERT
The purpose of this article is to study the work of conversion along with the dialectic entailed by any ritual phenomenon. The subject is obliged to change, but without obliterating the decision that falls to him. The author treats the effect of conversion as an active part with regard to which every subject confronted with the rite is to make a pronouncement. The conversion is manifested in the search for another way of saying, which can translate both the correspondence and the gap between the promise of new status and the postulate of immutable subjectal bases. For if the conversion is to enable the rite to work, it also necessitates an effect of falling concurrent with the sifting of a certain relation with oneself and the world.
POMMIER FRANÇOIS: THE RITE, A STATE OF SUSPENSION IN ADOLESCENCE
Having recalled the definition of the rite not only from the anthropological, but also from a psychoanalytical point of view and the articulation between these two aspects, the author of this article seeks, first in a general way, then by focusing more specifically on adolescent processes, to make a distinction between ritual and rite. He relates the first to conservation and unbinding, while placing the second on the side of depressiveness and subjectivation, with a call for progression in a temporal interval. The rite appears to belong essentially to the symbolic function, as a waiting solution, an area of reassurance which, from a dynamic point of view has a ludic dimension through a wish to break with repetitive mechanisms. The rite, at the crossroads of circular time and linear time appears as a « meta-stable » state which seeks not so much to make sense as to avoid a too sudden exit from the world of childhood.