The concerns that today’s adolescents have about ecology is investigated in light of contemporary philosophical and sociological thinking about man’s dependence on the environment. Though denied by modern society, this is emphasized by psychoanalysis. It can also be understood at an intra-psychic level through the debt owed to one’s forbears and the guilt that has been handed down. Ecological activism could enable adolescents to reestablish bonds that have been interrupted, as part of a true “return to origins” from them.
The author, using a particular kind of recourse to ideology, recalls the importance of the process of re-investment in adolescence and investigates the specific dynamic it maintains in the subject, between binding and unbinding. This approach aims to highlight the issues of the responder function and the risks to the adolescent when this responder is missing or cannot meet the challenges of the process of subjectivation.
»This article presents some recent developments in the theory of transmission. The author recalls the earliest contributions to this theory ; traumas endured by ancestors may be the source of the trouble, especially if they were experienced as shameful by the descendants and kept secret. But transmission has a structuring character for everyone; it is the basis for the establishment of the law, for the set-up of the family and for the attachment to ideals. Founding an essential axis for ethics, the notion of responsibility is also inscribed in a process of transmission. The author suggests that the parents’ gift to and the attitude toward their child plays a role in this, by giving impetus to acknowledgement in the child, in both senses of the word: that of gratitude and that of identifying the other as different.»
»Adolescence discovers that growing up incurs debts. The child was unable to grasp this. But the adolescent does not know how to pay back this debt ; he does not feel capable of it. Whence the tendency to challenge it, a way of both for seeing it and of keeping it at a distance; what results from this is protest, which stretches the bond while preserving it.»
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