Using my clinical experience in the world of high-level tennis, I will study adolescent players’ relation with eroticism and auto-eroticism through certain bodily and muscular movements that are repeated and sometimes associated with physical and emotional pain, in order to show the aspect of female masochism in this intensive practice of the sport. To shed light on the kind of masochism first theorized by Freud in 1924, I will try to make a distinction between the enjoyment and pleasure that may be experienced by the adolescent player who engages in tennis at a high level.
Here we work on the infra-representational object linking distinguished at the level of differentiated representations of the object : how to be oneself ? To be oneself, is it necessary both to be like the other and different from the other ? This contradiction inherent to development, which does such violence to the adolescent, can only be thought of after the fact. It is because he could accept to be fed by others that he can detach himself from them and feel more himself. Working on the quality of narcissistic bases, the author will use models of the attachment of auto-eroticism in its function of libidinally reinvesting control. It is a dialectic between internal resources and recourse to the peceptivo-motor external world, the purpose of which is developmental, especially through the counter-investment of internal reality.
This article attempts a clinical reflection about the act of prostitution and the psychical stakes it puts into play. A review of the history of research hypotheses and important moments allows us to stress to what extent knowledge of the anamnesis and traumas is insufficient for understanding the destiny of prostitution. Listening to clinical cases led me to take into account the force of words that have the value of an injunction, such as the “ You’re just a prostitute ” or the “ I’m a prostitute ” constructed by the subject. It is within this context of sensitivity to words that the function of the “ fourth character ” was deployed, as a figure of the social female Other to whom the act of prostitution is addressed and what is at stake in it for the subject. In fact, and this is our working hypothesis, the erotology of some of the prostitute’s tricks would contribute to the construction of oneself through the auto-erotic experiences involving the bodily orifices and what psychoanalysis calls the little a object. What we describe of the “ symbolic trick ” suggests that love is not absent from such a process of subjectivation.
In light of what is called the clinical treatment of borderline states, the author investigates some notions inscribed within the relations between body and psyche, such as perception, the sensory, sensuality, representation, emotion, affect and auto-eroticism.
Particular importance is given to the place occupied by infantile sensuality in connection with the establishment of auto-eroticism, insofar as sensuality is most often confused with the sensory. These notions still represent a large part of the difficulties psychoanalytical research encounters today. They maintain a narrow relation with the drives’ sphere of influence, but the opposition that has often been asserted to exist between the sensorial-perceptive and the intellectual can no longer be defended.
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