Using an encounter with an adolescent girl who committed an act of violence directed at the face, this article will discuss the role of the face and that of the disfiguring movement in the sexuation process of the adolescent girl. In its continuity with the body, the face is subjected to the violence of the pubertary process and to the demands of the work of the feminine. Failure to integrate a sexually differentiated face can lead to anxieties of disfigurement and defenses relating to the face, or else to acts of disfiguring violence.
Meeting with an adolescent girl in juvenile justice system, leads us to investigate the interweaving of endured violence and enacted violence and the ways they are repeated. After exploring the registers in which repetition occurs, we try to conceive of the outcome of thwarted motions. The act and its straying into violence may then be understood as the feminine going astray. We will conclude with some thoughts about the treatment of such issues.
This article considers acts of violence against woman to be as a desperate attempts to contain and transform the burden of traumatic excitations. It will argue that “femininicide” corresponds to the envious killing of the object’s desirability in response to the risk of invasion by the drives.
This article’s central hypothesis is that the central conflict of Lisa, a young bulimic woman, is transformed by fantasies of omnipotence. Lisa’s bulimic behaviors imply a loss of boundaries between self and not-self, leading to violations of the law. Her incestual complicity with her mother prompts us to explore issues of personalization and differentiation characterizing the subjectivation-work of an adolescent girl and its impact on the construction of her femininity.
Using clinical experience with radicalized adolescent girls, the clinical analysis of one of them enables the authors to investigate the intra and inter-psychical issues of jihadist engagement. This offers a first glimpse of psychoanalytical thinking about the resonance between propaganda speeches and the trials of the pubertary. Radicalization is here seen as a symptom, potentially offering the subject a new form of protest that is adolescent and feminine.
What do Balthus’ paintings of adolescence reveal ? Using Ph. Gutton’s recent book, Balthus et les jeunes filles ou le dévoilement du féminin, the painter’s work will be viewed in light of the issue of pubertary feminine metamorphosis. For like the psychoanalyst, the artist seems to understand that the pubertary feminine arises in the context of phallic infantile femininity. We also put ourselves in the place of Balthus’ young models, wondering what they are dreaming of.
Adolescence is marked by the subject’s encounter with the feminine and contains a potential for passion that in some adolescents may take the form of suffering for another’s sake. Discussion centers on another cause exclusive of the suffering that, I would argue, has to do with primal passion. Treatment work by way of the transference enables the subject to overcome the primal passion and exist as a desiring subject.
The adolescent process, through the unconscious readjustment that it entails, involves the integration of a new sensoriality that does not correspond to the symbolic order inherited from childhood, but corresponds to the arrival of the Feminine (Other sex) and the enjoyment of the Other. It is an effect of the pubertary real, a real whose outcome is a defining issue of the adolescent phase. How to move from this to an object caught up in reality, inscribed as the cause of desire and integrated into the obligations of the social realm?
This article deals with the issue of the « mother » tongue of the female child in exile and her bond with the mother during the pubertary process. This is a theoretical and clinical rereading of the case of an adolescent girl who spoke of the loss of her « momma » tongue in relation to the clinical work.
The play of exchange between male and female enacted by the mangas seems to satisfy the fantasy and the anxiety of sexual indistinctness in the adolescent, who is invited by this reading to « undergo a complete mutation while remaining the same »… The thematic of the mangas highlights the major impact of this fantasy of permutation of the sexes through transvestitism, while they seem to us to mask resistances to the sexual choice. The permeability between male and female figures, insisting on enacting an exhibitionism of the feminine, aims more to make the female sex « shine », to the detriment of a modification of the object relation. The adjustment of sexual ambiguity to reality, by reactivating the projective system, seems to settle for a cultural image that is both playful and complex, figuring something of the actuality of the work on sexual differentiation.
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