Thanks to social media, the adolescent is experimenting with his relation to others and himself. Sometimes these expressions of identity through images go too far. Even though the content shared by adolescents may shock, hypothesizing that this is all “deviance” has its limits. On the Internet, what differentiates psychical suffering from a typical adolescent posting would be the young person’s ability to inscribe him or herself afterwards between narcissistic and objectal, within a desire for “extimacy.”
Michael Jackson’s life was akin to a long one man show that ended when he was barely fifty years old. What did the adolescence of the star represent, for himself first of all ? Indeed, the physical transformations of puberty will for him generate massive anxieties, causing virulent and repeated attacks against his own body, finally leading to a genuine destruction of his physical appearance. His inability to accept these inherent elements of puberty were nevertheless counterbalanced by the sublimatory value of his artistic creativity. Thus the moonwalk, the artist’s true signature, an acted and performed expression, may be the translation of fantasy scenario closely tied to the trauma of puberty and maternal castration. Recourse to a phenomenon of « extimization » of internal reality could thus have manage to produce a sublimated actualization of fantasies transformed in the fire of his esthetic creation.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 1005-1030.
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