How can an adolescent authorize him or herself to have a sexual relationship? Access to the jouissance of the body follows the path of the letter in order for desire to emerge. The phallic function becomes the vector, via the possibility for a subject to use the Name-of-the-Father in order to “take the leap” of performing the sexual act. How can the success or failure of this process be approached in the treatment of adolescents? The ways of knowing how to deal with castration are specific yet all refer back to the universal of the father as name (Name-of-the-Father).
Through an analysis of the Pina Bausch’s show Kontakthof with adolescents over the age of fourteen, we explore the body, desire, castration, dream and identification in adolescence. We will see how a group can come together not on the basis of a protective ideal, but rather on the impetus of desire. This desire relates to dreaming and playing and manifests itself in dancing.
The issue of the veil is approached by way of some its structural elements, which cause its “ logic ” to meet up with that of unconscious desire referred to the feminine : the set-up of the drives, the construction of the corporal imaginary that calls upon the concepts of Chose, and of the Lacanian object a. We will speak of how the metaphors of the veil open out onto philosophical and aesthetic fields investigated by way the problematic of castration. Through these psychoanalytical references, it is possible to shed some light on the alienating social consequences of the wearing of the veil by women.
School, both the symbolical organisation of the social body and the setting up/building up of the individual, operates on the relations between power and desire. But this way of looking at the structuring of people’s craving for knowledge must be combined with an analysis of School and of the relationships to the Other that are generated by the Academic Institution. Then this process will make it possible to assess the understanding of the Discontents of the French School Institution as the actor/promoter of a monistic republican Citizenship. In the French social system within which school plays the part of leaven, the Other must turn into the Same. Through this, we can understand how tense relationships at school are.
The language of adolescents is a symptom, necessitating both psychical elaboration and the social and cultural inscription of symbolic practices. Linguistic practices cannot be reduced to the rupture of codes, but rather constitute a language of transit that speaks as much of the urgent need to communicate as of the even more imperious need to not be found, in order to confront the physical, psychical and social upheavals which animate them. Adolescent speech thus becomes a place where the desire of the subject can manage to say itself, outside of the mother tongue, and language may be conceived of as a metonymical representation of the gestating identity.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°4, pp. 959-970.
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