Starting with the postulate that the sexual revolution of the sixties brought about what M. Tort calls « the end of paternal dogma », we suggest that the suburban slums be viewed as enclaves of resistance against the end of an erotic inequality in which the male has the advantage. Beyond the fact that control of femininity is a shared value, virginity continues to considered as sacred, a guarantee of family honor, in the suburban housing projects, while a pervading post-modernity moves towards less difference between the sexes. This clash between two symbolic universes thus increases the conflicts inherent to the delayed action effect of the adolescens process. We will consider that the refusal of the feminine in the adolescent girl and the hatred of the feminine in the adolescent boy result from the same translation of puzzling messages received from the adult other, integrating female sexuality as potentially dishonoring and always dishonorable, and also from a human environment that is « not good enough » to transmit the ways of access to symbolization.
Today’s delinquency, characterized by aggression against the other, the counterpart, which is often sudden, indeed, an immediate, destructive explosion, belongs to the archaic which has to do with the subjective existence of the subject. Judicial approaches offer forms of social re-education and prevention, focused on the transgressive, disorganizing act rather than on the potential for starting over, lead to the « confinement » of these problematic adolescents and young adults, reproducing a stigmatization of the troublemakers within prison walls.
In what turns out to be an impasse, « confinement » can carry out and induce the dynamic of a passage, by establishing frameworks for therapeutic mediation which involve the violent adolescent in a work of psychical re-elaboration and in a relaunching of his subjective dynamic. This opens the way to constructive and creative drive satisfactions which are not just a place of release for these adolescents. These transformative spaces can lead to symbolization and put these youths back into a network of intersubjectivity, a community of exchanges enabling them to turns towards a space of possibilities. Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 797-813.
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