The aim of this article is to relate activism at the time of the pubertary process to the adolescent’s dual mission of finding a place in the world as it exists, and at the same time finding ways to express a drive that will always feel singular. Issues of reinvestment give rise to a search for the right relationship between binding and unbinding, an unavoidable dialectic which defines the human being’s inscription in the world.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 43-55.
Using a clinical vignette, the authors revisit silence and the inhibition of psychical function in adolescents. They emphasize the work of the preconscious, which plays a major role in dealing with the excitations and genitality proper to the adolescent process, and try to articulate this with a theory of therapeutic technique with adolescents.
The camera of Abdellatif Kechiche reveals the body in the throes of the drives and the metamorphosis of Psyche. Through the story of the young Adele, from adolescence to adulthood, the film raises the question of adolescent sexuality, the choice of love object, femininity and homosexuality.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 1, 195-206.
The adolescent tries to construct a language attesting to his revolt. However, the demands of the code inherent in all speech compel him to the organization of sophisticated rules, and it would be a mistake to see this as ruining classical language. This paper looks at norms that are called into question by creative processes born from revolt and excess.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 87-94.
The metapsychological notions of drive and instinct should be carefully distinguished. So are they in Freud’s german language, which uses both termes instinkt and trieb in an absolutely different way. However, they have always been confused since strachey’s syncretic translation of both by « instinct ». Instincts and drives are opposites in man : innate and adapted on the one side, acquired (precociously) polymorphous and anarchic on the other side. Search for appeasement (instinct) against search for excitation (drive).
In the human being, there exist instinctual behaviours of self-preservation, of which the theory of attachment has demonstrated the width, the precocity (early competencies) and the intersubjective caracter. On the other hand, in the sexual domain, instinct makes its appearance only at the puberal or prepuberal time. It is in the midst of the « silence » of sexual instinct, between birth and puberty, that the sexual drive surges and develops. It does this while leaning on the self-preservation instinct, and through the process of « generalized seduction ».
At puberty, the sexual instinct has to compromise with the infantile drive, which is, so to speak, already « in office ».
It is the infantile sexual drive, as repressed in the unconscious, that makes the object of psychoanalysis.
Considering the psychic changes caused by this period, adolescence brings the pubescent individual to accomplish the double task of leaving archaic passions behind, and of experimenting new ways of drive satisfaction. In order to summarize this subjective involvement specific to the adolescent process, the authors suggest the concept of « the work of adolescence ». Based on a clinical case, the present report aims at examining the main properties of the work of adolescence. This analysis is based upon an impossible adolescence due to an archaic problem anchored in the psychic functioning of the subject. Through defence mechanisms developed, such as delusional emergence and artistic production, the work of adolescence is investigated in the case of a traumatic maternal encroachment which disrupts the dynamics of identity.
A clinical treatment of adolescent self-mutilation is possible as long as the adolescent is posited as being in a phenomenal crisis between two bodies. Not only between the child’s body and the adult body, but above all between the body of the partial drives and the phallicized body. The scene of the origins of the human body is psychically re-found and recreated at this moment. The author bets that a reading of the exchanges between Caillois and Bataille will give a glimpse of the adolescent tension in its subjectivation of the corporal.
Adolescence is characterized by an instability and a vulnerability of the systems of psychical functioning, within which the drive is oriented towards diverse and potentially changing outcomes. This problematic is actualized in sessions of psychotherapy, affecting their course. In addition, putting narcissism back into play in therapeutic dialogues leads to other parameters, in particular one that I have called « the transitionalization of exchanges », to which I refer in relation to the body. Drive is studied on a theoretical plane, and its place is analyzed in different systems of psychical functioning that one might find in the session. Their swift variations can pose a problem. In this context, transforming what might appear to be an obstacle to the good progression of the treatment into a therapeutic resource seems to me a clinical and theoretical goal. This work may form a basis for reflection, which should be continued and completed in the future.
The question of the migraine as a body event in an adolescent is treated with reference to its articulation with the drive. We thus explore the shared elements of both pain and drive, with respect to their connection to the body. Furthermore, we discuss one of the analyst’s interventions during a session, as well as its clinical consequences on the subject’s relationship with the invocatory drive and with its object, the voice. The function of the voice and of its drive shaping as mediation between primitive parental authority and the constitution of the subject’s superego is also developed here. We mostly insist on the function of extraction of the voice object from the body, and we therefore refer to the Freudian concept of « the thing », as well as to the Lacanian object a, in its primary dimension concerning the drive. We thus emphasize the relationship between the drive and the little object a during adolescence.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 143-155.
This review of the collection of articles directed by Sébastien Dupont and Hugues Paris emphasizes the adolescent girl’s aspect of evanescence, as it has been explored and exploited by contemporary cinema. The adolescent girl appears to be an expression of what eludes total understanding. The different figures of the adolescent girls, exhibited by the cinematic work, attest to an effect of diffraction which is linked to the experience of drives imposed on the subject.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 1033-1046.