Today’s delinquency, characterized by aggression against the other, the counterpart, which is often sudden, indeed, an immediate, destructive explosion, belongs to the archaic which has to do with the subjective existence of the subject. Judicial approaches offer forms of social re-education and prevention, focused on the transgressive, disorganizing act rather than on the potential for starting over, lead to the « confinement » of these problematic adolescents and young adults, reproducing a stigmatization of the troublemakers within prison walls.
In what turns out to be an impasse, « confinement » can carry out and induce the dynamic of a passage, by establishing frameworks for therapeutic mediation which involve the violent adolescent in a work of psychical re-elaboration and in a relaunching of his subjective dynamic. This opens the way to constructive and creative drive satisfactions which are not just a place of release for these adolescents. These transformative spaces can lead to symbolization and put these youths back into a network of intersubjectivity, a community of exchanges enabling them to turns towards a space of possibilities.
Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 797-813.