Freud exhorts us to be organized for death in order to endure life. When faced with death, the refugee subject tries to reorganize his psychic life, to imaginarily reconstruct an identity shaken by trauma. But faced with the malaise brought on by war, he resists, seeking refuge in any expression of the negative.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 2, 403-414.
Returning with D. W. Winnicott and J. Lacan to the question of adolescence as a social as well as subjective phenomenon, this paper seeks to identify what is at stake during this period, namely a new articulation of jouissance and the body based on the three figures of “the paternal metaphor”, that is to say from the Oedipal scenario.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2,251-260.
rom a study longitudinal being about children and teenager with high potential, I want to talk about two clever babies development became clever teenagers, and the link between traumatophilia and death. I will develop two clinical cases, one referring to childhood and adolescence of Blaise Pascal and his passion for mathematics, the other is a longitudinal study which explain the love passion of Ariane, a young gifted girl met at 8 and 14 years. Traumatisms by exess and traumatisms by default will build babies and teenager with a high potential, that will be my first hypothesis. My second hypothesis is about the traumatophilic movement which come reinforce, or even doing violence to the separation process : for the gifted teenagers, love passion no need separation.
Love and death, rather than fighting against each other, sometimes meet during adolescence. In Leonce and Lena from G. Büchner, the two eponymous adolescent heroes evocate death and its associated representations, the dead child or suicide, when they meet and fall in love. Death symbolises and sums up the threat of loss that the discovery of the genital object occurs. It is called by the adolescent in order to « refresh » and produce a anticathexis of an instinct whom he fears the incestuous coloration.
Adolescence is a time of great vulnerability for identity because of internal turmoil caused by the eruption of puberty and real consequences for his psychic economy. This identity is inconceivable without a meeting must for any teenager with the question of death and its outcome. The author attempts to examine how a modern society mélancoliforme, the teenager, suffering from Baudelaire’s spleen, is testing its ability to survive the experience of confrontation with death that depends on its becoming psychic adult.
This paper presents a clinical case in which an » unpleasant encounter » in reality, i.e. the announcement of bearing the HIV virus has entailed an immediate regression of the subject in time towards that very moment of his adolescence in which some kind of psychological rehandling had been stopped. It discusses the regression towards the infantile that took place, leading to a re-negociation in the deferred action of the Oedipian conflict that had suddenly been stopped and fixed on the occasion of the death of the father when the subject was 15. It suggests the hypothesis according to which this may have taken place again in a progredient rehandling in which his own confrontation to the death to come at last offered the subject the opprtunity, that had remained uncertain up to then, to identify himself to the father through death and thus regain some kind of filial relationship in a rehabilitation of its function. To leave behind a grandiose father, outside the possibilities of any form of identification, in order to erect an Oedipian father liable to be an ideal and also to be structuring, seems to have been one of the outcome of seropositivity.
Hypochondriac complaints, frequent during adolescence, are a request directed at another and address an object of love and/or hatred. The adolescent is complaining about the traumatic breaking-in of puberty and seeking the witness of others. Hypochondriac complaints are carriers of a massive narcissistic investment. The organ about which the adolescent complains condenses the whole of the traumatized body through genitalization. The body, centered by its multiple complaints, is a place of projection, crystallizing in the body mass all thought, which then becomes meaningless. The hypochondriac adolescent, prompted by a very active underground fantasy of immortality, seems to substitute the time-space dimension of disease for the time and space of human existence ending in death.
Fantasio and Leonce, the eponymous adolescent heroes of works by de Musset and Büchner, grapple with a static temporality, synonymous with boredom, brooding, and emptiness. This temporality opens onto death, seen as the only reality once they leave the Edenic timelessness of a childhood whose symptom is the fantasy of the dead child. This frustrating relationship with time seems to be a sign of the trauma represented in adolescence by the encounter with the genital object. Death seems to be put forward as protection against the sexual, and the suspension of time seems to be the dramatic strategy developed to “delay” the dreaded amorous encounter.
Invited by his therapist to write as freely as possible, a fourteen year-old adolescent boy treated in a day hospital will tell a story filled with various representations of death. Dan will try to find a response to these, one that is salutary and most often made possible by the summoning up of different fictional characters. His story will finally conclude with a scene where death and symbol come together to finally attempt some structuring discovery.
The author suggests some lines of reflection about the mystery and phenomenon of death. One must indeed distinguish, as the Romans did, between mortalis, moribundus, moriens, and mortuus. This distinction is essential for enabling an organization of research on the intimate bond between conception, the primal, and the « ancient fear ». Relying also on clinical experience, the author points out that the concept of primary identification is essential to reading analytically the specific psychical activity that is called the work of trespass. The dying person does tend to form a last dyade with his caregiver, the last depository of the transference, along the model of the early relation with the mother.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 147-159.