Using both the biography and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, the author proposes three hypotheses : first, in the early, poetic, part of the poet’s life, Rimbaud’s writing served as a means of deflection and refraction of the psyche that enabled him to create the « third party » space that his father could not or did not know how to hold in face of the mother’s omnipresence. The second part of his life was in Africa, the place where the father had lived and the place of « the right to go away » (Baudelaire) which would serve this « deflective modality », a form of « subjectivation-action » which is proper to adolescence. The second point is that a number of Rimbaud’s poetic pieces were, as Piera Aulagnier has shown elsewhere, so many projections of a reconstruction of the past into the future, operations which are indispensable to adolescent narcissism. Thirdly, the melancholic movement proper to adolescent subjective construction finds in the writing of poetry (brilliantly in Rimbaud, more commonly in other pubescent youngsters, including in their songs) an evanescent object that can always be found again, compulsively, in and through, the « writing work » that confronts the adolescent with the « work of melancholy » around the lost primary object.

revue Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°4, pp. 913-926.