The author focuses on the polemic about the dangers of NTIC for the mental heath of adolescents. It argues that the defenders of NTIC are characterized by a disavowal of the problem of their overuse and the importance of links between human beings, by a dubious assertion of their value as self-therapy, and by an improper use of psychoanalytical concepts. He associates this attitude with a lack of tolerance for internal and external alterity, a feature of our modern life that is fostered by the virtualization of experience.
Here we discuss, in the name of psychoanalysis, the conception of alterity in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and highlight what is definitive in it. We situate ourselves not with regard to psychoanalysis, but with regard to philosophy when it takes up the fundamental hypothesis (the unconscious). We show how, for alterity itself, the affirmation of philosophical knowledge, but of a knowledge that heralds the unconscious, and its reality, sex, becomes essential. It then appears that any truth contained in three revelations – Christian, Jewish and Moslem – must come from this knowledge.
The purpose of this article is to explore the street as a space for the adolescent’s possible confrontation with the newness of the pubertaire, in terms of radical alterity and possible encounter. This will lead us to develop the dialectic between the intra-psychical world of the adolescent, confronted with the effects of the inaugural real of the pubertaire, and the world of the social, as a place for the possible figuration of this real by the encounter with other of the Other sex. Here we will revisit the dialectical issues of theoretical perspectives developed by the revue Adolescence (Philippe Gutton) and those argued by le Bachelier (Jean-Jacques Rassial), moving from an intra-psychical and intra-familial reference to that of the social as a place for the constitution of the adolescent symptôme.
This article crosses psychoanalytical and anthropological perspectives in order to analyse the logics of social fractures in adolescence when these are experienced and legitimized in terms of “ ethnic ”or “ racial ” fractures. These demands are made into the symptom of a serious rupture in the assemblages between otherness and identity. The fate of many young people, though dedicated to entering into a shared, secular world, is here envisaged as a response to a logic of segregation.
The construction of identity is mobile and present ; it has the important quality of being sexual. First of all, the phallic infantile, then, at puberty major readjustments take place because of the experience of the pubertaire. The author describes this “ metamorphosis ” in a number of works which are recalled and brought together here. He now emphasizes on the organization that constitutes the other: what other ? The unconscious of the other in romantic seduction.
The psychotherapy of a teenager who practices body attacks sheds light on archaic processes at work in terms of bodily resistance to the investment of the object and the refusal of otherness. The dual situation reactualizes an internal otherness blocked by adhesive, anti-drive alienation from tyrannical, undifferentiated objects. Vigilance against visible « sensory-motor » objects as an effect of the Other, and against the counter-transference, works, with the aid of a psychodramatic style, to re-establish the transitionality which was blocked in this narcissistic teenager.
The authors consider the language as the place where the subjects build their identity. They examine how current post-modernity is changing our ways of speaking. They suppose that a new newspeak is showing up, changing widely the conditions of subjectivation and socialization, especially during adolescence.
This review of the collection of articles directed by Sébastien Dupont and Hugues Paris emphasizes the adolescent girl’s aspect of evanescence, as it has been explored and exploited by contemporary cinema. The adolescent girl appears to be an expression of what eludes total understanding. The different figures of the adolescent girls, exhibited by the cinematic work, attest to an effect of diffraction which is linked to the experience of drives imposed on the subject.
This article considers the specificity of current adolescent pathologies (ways of functioning using unlimited primary processes, externalization of intrapsychical conflicts, recourse to the act, to violence and to self-calming excitation) from the perspective of the complexity of the Psyche, which is able to combine Oedipal drive conflict with the archaic problematic. These are the modalities of analytic work which must be investigated. Hypotheses about the intersubjective encounter in the session, and about a necessary overcoming of the opposition between narcissism and object relation, are offered in order to foster thinking about alterity.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 67-78.
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