Alban is twelve years old. He stabbed his father. This article offers an epistemological reading of the act in order to remove the impasses of an approach that is too diachronic and procedural. The hypothesis is that a parricidal act can be seen as a fragment of mythic truth presenting the repetition of a phylogenetic metaphor: the murder of the primal father. This metaphor is explored by means of transference issues it gives rise to, especially pertaining to fetishistic identification and to the disavowal of female castration in the primal scene.
The author offers a theory of adolescence based on the necessary subjective revolution introduced by the emergence of the potential for orgasm linked to the biological maturation of puberty. But this is first experienced passively because it is « imposed » on the adolescent by biology. It is in the work of subjective re-appropriation the adolescent is then led to perform that we must place the adolescent’s relationship with death and the different forms that can be produced by the encounter with death. Confronted with the issue of death, the adolescent will mobilize the potential of the act in order to try to differentiate the psychical registers threatened with confusion by the contingencies of this encounter and try to set some limits by falling back on those of the body.
The author takes off from a prior work relating the place of remorse in the analysis of an adolescent who became a murderer in order to reread and re-interpret the place of this affect in the texts where Freud speaks of his self-analysis. He points out an implicit theory, which ties in with the explicit theory, barely sketched out, and emphasizes in particular the active and positive side of this affect most often presented as a handicap. He then shows the different faces that remorse can assume in the treatment of the adolescent, working with the principle characteristics pointed out in the preceding discussion, so as to facilitate its detection, its being taken into consideration, and its evolution. This study also seeks to help better differentiate the major affects and to show how to position ourselves when one of them appears central and dominant, whether it be shame, guilt, sadness, or remorse.
The passage through adolescence itself raises the question of the act and its different dimensions, which we will approach from a clinical point of view in this article. If the act which separates the subject from the Other introduces a rupture, it also allows him to find a new symbolic position. In this article we wish to explore the dimensions of the act and its connection with anxiety, using the case of a young paranoiac subject who, with the help of analytical work, struggles not to be in the position of object to which he could be reduced by the risks associated with the dimension of the passage to the act.
Using studies of Schreber as a starting point, the author highlights one particular part of the paranoiac relation with the Other and others : « the other wants something from me » which is the structural model of human relations in the current civilisation driven by liberalism. This paranoiac relationship with our fellow-men builds a manner of relating to the act which offers total realisation of enjoyment, restricted only by impotence. The subject then finds himself inscribed in a relation with fellow-men which is made of violence, faced with the hindrances that everyday life in society imposes on thrill-seeking. The human relations turn into violence against the persecutory fellow-men. Teenagers, more than anyone else, bear witness to this new kind of social bond.
In this article, the clinical treatment of the act is used to show how adolescent psychopathology attests to the state of the social bond in which the afflicted adolescents are growing up. Extreme psychopathologies are thus viewed as the success of the modern political bond, the free market liberalism which promotes self-fulfillment through performances that enact limitless enjoyment and the refusal of the human malady: castration.
The author stresses four points mentioned by J. Dayan and B. Guillery-Girard. The first has to do with the reversal of conceptions of adolescence into a teleological model. The second offers a new reading of the clinical signs : a conception of the act not as a symptom, but rather as a structuring process. The third concerns the way in which we can conceive of the articulation between neurosciences and psychoanalysis. The last discusses the edification of a new framework for psychopathology. From the place of the « all-neuroscience » in the psychology of common sense, to the opening of a fruitful theorization, these interactions continue to raise questions for us.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 517-526.
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