The 2018 publication of S. Ferrières-Pestureau’sLa violence à l’œuvre (Violence at work) provides a spot-on illustration of the way that art at different times periods has taken up what exceeds the various declensions of the human body that translates its violence. The author of this article relates major events of western history to the pictorial representations that either interpreted or provoked them, noting new perceptions of violence arising from the body.
How did Freud become Freud? Studying Freud étudiant (Freud the student), this article examines a previously unseen portrait of psychoanalysis’ founder, unearthed by meticulous biographical research that is constantly alert to the adolescent underneath the psychoanalyst. A discussion of the results of this “biographical challenge,” which traces within Freud the adolescent who came before him, raises the question: “is the adolescence ofFreud truly enough to explain adolescence forFreud?
The concept of the difficult adolescentenables us to escape from the nosographic trap of attributing the causes of violence solely to the one who commits it. Considering the question of the bond offers the possibility for a complex critical analysis of environmental factors, especially institutional ones, that contribute to violence. By discounting the relational, institutional administrations contribute to the reification of the subject, making both the public and professionals more vulnerable. As secret accomplices to violence, institutions reap what they sow.
An adolescent may transfer his own inner disorganization onto the people around him, causing misunderstandings and tensions to emerge among them. The problematic that the adolescent is unconsciously asking them to harbor may induce great interpersonal violence, with the risk of shattering institutional bonds. Several examples will shed light on the intersubjective mechanisms at work in this phenomenon.
This article focuses on violent acts in the adolescent hospitalized in psychiatry, using a clinical case to discuss, on the one hand, how through the violent act and lack of symbolization, the adolescent will come to figure a pubertary impasse, inviting a hypothesis of pubertary psychosis; and on the other hand, how the clinician can open up a therapeutic perspective when faced with ruptures of the symbolic process that drive the adolescent to enact violence.
Using a clinical situation encountered in a psychiatric service for adolescents, we will develop what we call a “borderline clinic” of adolescence, showing how this clinical work can put the institution to the test. We will attempt to show how the institution can develop its symbolic potential in order to humanize violence, by developing its capacities for listening and verbal exchange and by “hystericizing” the melancholic movements at work in this clinical field.
Transgender children and adolescents have become increasingly visible in recent years, which raises the question of the relation between trans-identity and the adolescent process. This article offers a reflection on the connection. We will also put into perspective the adolescent’s “psychic suffering” in relation to potential external violence coming from the socius, the psycho-medical approach and our own theoretical assumptions.
The passage through adolescence may give rise to a violent family crisis, echoing group processes of generational transmission and adolescent experiences of subjects in the present. Psychoanalytic family therapy, taking place within a psychiatric setting that offers several different treatment places and times, enables a revisiting of the processes of symbolization, with the support of mediating objects: those provided by the therapists but also those invented by the family.
After more than seventy years of peace in western Europe, one may wonder what becomes of destructiveness in such unprecedented conditions. Perhaps we are witnessing what might be likened to “civil wars”: suicides, family break-ups, the policing of civilian life. After presenting two clinical vignettes, one illustrating intrafamilial wars, the other illustrating institutional wars, the author will compare these two forms and offer some considerations about the difference between individual and group passages to the act.
The purpose of this article is to conceptualize the phenomenon of violence using a mixed method: a review of history and literature will be brought to bear on clinical methodology. The hypothesis demonstrated is that violence dwells in the interstices between the subject and the social, and emerges from defects in the symbolic system, in the case of adolescence, crime, and “madness.” Work on violence as a responseto what remains beyond the symbolic thus strives for meaning, to prevent the violence of one from becoming the violence of all.
Adolescence, 2019, 37, 2, 325-341.
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