Astonishment and surprise are motors for psychic rebinding. Through the bonus of pleasure these technical tools give rise to, they permit us to offer a new narration of what is causing the problem. These concepts are all the more useful in that they enter into the framework of puberty. The psychotherapist must do more to maintain a great capacity for astonishment and surprise in order to foster new possibilities for psychic binding, while avoiding the ever present risk of fright.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Sauver la planète – 2021 T. 39 n°1
Youth magnified or threatening: What concern(s) for the future
Using two very different clinical cases, this article offers an anthropological exploration of contemporary conceptions of youth. These conceptions are linked to the opening up of places of confinement and to the promotion of individual autonomy. They are unevenly distributed according to social milieu and gender. Faced with threats to the environment, the tendency of individual capacities to double down on the consumption of resources and on the culture/nature dualism is becoming a problem.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 199-208.
Free planets for adolescents
This article, as an extension of D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the environment, analyzes in our hypermodernity the opposition between individual and collective expressions of the antisocial tendency, the two central aspects of which are busyness and the destruction of nature. We will thus show how the process of adolescent subjectivation requires one to survive a lost planet by creating free planets. An account of a clinical case will illustrate our ideas.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 187-198.
The object and the external threat
The external threat that nature will disappear seems to reveal another, internal threat of the loss of the object in adolescence. Without the support of the external object feeding the investment of the internal object, the unrepresentable arises, produced by the object within the Ego. The mobilization of underlying processes for preservation, by enabling the reinvestment of the sexual object, leads to the indispensable narcissistic maintenance of a “feeling of existence” in adolescence.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 151-166.
Adolescent torments and ecological crisis
Activist youth tries to combat political denial in the face of an ecological emergency. Both shouts of solidarity and the pains of solitary patients remind us that inaction has grave consequences, the magnitude of which are shown by the current health crisis. In such a climate, what kind of eco-responsible care of the psyche should we champion? Welcoming the diversity of living creatures, taking care of one’s environment, listening to uniqueness, committing for the long term, cultivating the garden of possibilities. We must take a fiery stand against the politics of health care.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 139-149.
Of ants and men: Ecological activism and sublimation of the pubertary process?
The authors see the activism of some adolescents in the fight against ecosystem mutations and the necessity of their being acknowledged by adults as the expression of a psychical work of democratization. The case of Jonathan, a tormented adolescent who raises ants, illustrates a possible way of encountering the non-human environment, one which is gratifying both for narcissism and for ideals, but which reveals considerable extinction anxiety.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 125-138.
The time of tomorrow. Institution, environment
The article addresses the way that adolescents imagine the future with regard to the present, and take ownership of the present time through contemporary environmental problems. By means of two clinical vignettes, the authors will attempt to show how adolescents apprehend the end of the world: planet and institution are brought together. What capacities do adolescents have to project themselves into the future, based on the things that have been handed down to them and their ability to transform these things?
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 111-124.
Return to origins
The concerns that today’s adolescents have about ecology is investigated in light of contemporary philosophical and sociological thinking about man’s dependence on the environment. Though denied by modern society, this is emphasized by psychoanalysis. It can also be understood at an intra-psychic level through the debt owed to one’s forbears and the guilt that has been handed down. Ecological activism could enable adolescents to reestablish bonds that have been interrupted, as part of a true “return to origins” from them.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 95-109.
Hypereality and belief: Welcome to the new world where the truth is non-negotiable
The real is not merely the excess that invades or overwhelms us; it is also what is not perceived as not having been sufficiently given and which always eludes us. On the individual and collective scale, it takes the form of economic rationale and unrealistic positivism.
Art, as a falsification of the real, is a useful remedy, or even a rescue, in helping to ward off the prevailing economism that disenchants our reality by enabling a reinvention of oneself and the world. But it veers into absurdity and destructiveness if it does not remain tangential to the external and internal limits of the real. There can be only one indication for psychoanalysis today: disenchantment in the face of the real. It offers an adventure it offers to the subject who wishes to taste the vitality of truth and freedom, to be free to confront pain and surmount it in order not to be “really” afraid.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 69-94.
The risks of confinement
The lockdown was a litmus test of the quality of adolescents’ relationship with their parents. Some enjoyed the unexpected availability of their parents; others suffered from being sequestered in close quarters with them. Some continued to gather in groups without regard for the health regulations. Lockdown parties were held in secret, as were many parties after the lockdown, with the same disregard for precautionary measures. This article analyzes such transgressions as a way of fabricating intensity of being, carried out with the ambivalence of a “I know, but still” attitude.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 57-68.