abandonment, the necessary prelude to adoption, is here conceived of as the first step that enables filiation. The adoptive child must himself abandon his birth parents in order to adopt his new parents. This reappropriation of abandonment is made inevitable by the subjectivation of adolescence. It requires that one get past the real trauma of rejection in order to inscribe it as the structuring trauma of the loss and the gift. It affects every subject when he or she re-establishes filiation in adolescence.
This article tries to combat received ideas about the “ mystical experience ” and to resituate it within the history of the person who lives it in order to show its possible creativity. After an evocation of the “ burning bush ”, the story of Edith Stein will be examined in order to show how her encounter with Christ, if she is recounting the facts of her experiences, opened up a future to her, giving her access to another apprehension of the world: conflicts that had until then been irresolvable find a possible resolution in an atmosphere of paradoxes, helping to reduce splitting and move from the constraints of a controlling relation to another kind, wherein the human truth of abandonment is discovered.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 117-129.
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