El autor aborda la experiencia mística a partir de narraciones clásicas como el mito de la caverna y la conversión de Moisés para aclarar los testimonios que nos vienen en escucha analítica la más corriente. El nos muestra que la experiencia mística es un momento intenso en que el sujeto siente en una luz la sensación de acceder al gozo ideal que ha imaginado locamente desde la infancia y se envuelve con las delicias sin saber exactamente de que se trata. Es también el momento en el que le regresan dolorosamente las fallas y las sombras de sus experiencia primeras y donde se arriesga de someterse cuerpo y alma tanto las cosas son indisociables del gozo en cuestión ; entregándose a los síntomas tales como la adicción o los pasajes al acto que son directamente bajo su gobierno. Es finalmente y sobre todo, el instante en el que él esta obligado de asumir los conflictos que resultan si quiere sacar una experiencia de lo que conlleva esas experiencias excepcionales y lleva la experiencia en lo mas profundo de si y la realidad en la cual esta llamado a intervenir.
¿Como un adolescente puede entrar en política en el sentido propio del término ? El amor de los ideales el cual se manifiesta brutalmente en este periodo de la existencia, es probablemente la causa más determinante. Todavía falta precisar los componentes de este amor y las diferentes categorías de los ideales concernidos. Lo que Freud no ha hecho más que esquizar en la segunda parte de su obra. Entonces, nos apercibimos que el acceso a la política supone a la vez la adhesión a los ideales los más universales y el respeto de los ideales narcísicos parciales o sociales que impone la existencia. Es entonces una fuente de conflictos permanentes y el adolescente no puede ocuparse de ellos a nivel colectivo de otra manera que entrando en el discurso político en el sentido mas largo. Considerando los ideales y llamándolos por su propio nombre sin ocultarse sus propios limites. Es por este camino que el lo retoma por su cuenta y se comporta en sujeto un sujeto necesariamente dividido entre sus imperativos contradictorios pero que toma el riesgo de proponerse a partir de sus propias convicciones.
Homero privilegia dos tipos de héroes : el de Aquiles en la Iliada que sublima el combate a muerte generando seguidores en el curso de la historia ; y aquel que encarna Ulises en la Odisea donde el héroe se ilustra saliendo de los obstáculos que el encuentra sobre su camino de regreso hacia su lugar de origen. De un lado tenemos una lucha dual que trae consigo una notoriedad pero provoca la destrucción de una de las dos partes presentes. Del otro lado el combate de todos los instantes del héroe para salvar su vida y encontrara su lugar en la ciudad. El primero privilegia la mirada y se somete a las exigencias de la imagen ; contrariamente al segundo quién combate a los ojos que lo dominan y descompone los mecanismos para darse un nombre. El proceso adolescente participa a la vez de esos dos caminos y supone el desprendimiento progresivo de la dominación del ver que hace ambicionar el ideal. Haciendo referencia a diversas obras literarias el autor muestra a que condiciones es posible esta evolución.
The author takes off from a prior work relating the place of remorse in the analysis of an adolescent who became a murderer in order to reread and re-interpret the place of this affect in the texts where Freud speaks of his self-analysis. He points out an implicit theory, which ties in with the explicit theory, barely sketched out, and emphasizes in particular the active and positive side of this affect most often presented as a handicap. He then shows the different faces that remorse can assume in the treatment of the adolescent, working with the principle characteristics pointed out in the preceding discussion, so as to facilitate its detection, its being taken into consideration, and its evolution. This study also seeks to help better differentiate the major affects and to show how to position ourselves when one of them appears central and dominant, whether it be shame, guilt, sadness, or remorse.
Collective pornographic exhibitionism has today taken the place of the individual exhibitionism of yesteryear and offers a new kind of challenge. We are actually witnessing an invasion of images inspired by X-rated films reaching more and more children and adolescents : while their passage to adulthood presupposes an imaginary elaboration wherein modesty holds a crucial place, these exhibitions risk short-circuiting the courses of desire. The author shows how this confrontation has in a few years become a new test of initiation for youngsters, the main one as far as sexual matters are concerned. He highlights the difficulties this leads to and draws from his knowledge of exhibitionism some guides for the most helpless. Rather than taking refuge in total suppression, which would only intensify the phenomenon, he suggests we take stock of our collective responsibility and reconsider our conception of sexuality in light of human creativity.
The adolescent who turns against his own body is often imprisoned in a logic of doubles from which he tries to protect himself and which he tries to escape. This has the advantage of maintaining the illusion of omnipotence he experienced as a child, of projecting it onto the other with accompanying violence, and of stabilizing the latter by turning it back upon itself in a targeted, limited way. The mutilations that he inflicts on himself are thus real witnesses to the illusion that he needs to construct. What is interesting about a work like Verdi’s Le Trouvère is that it gives us access to the mythic scenario underlying this type of behavior and opens it up to analysis. In it we discover, notably, how self-mutilation is for some adolescents a rite of passage allowing them to confront a mythical double, to their detriment at first, but with the possibility of unmasking it later.
Only for the past half century or so have philosophy and the human sciences considered the gaze in itself and studied its presence and action in current life and in history. Using recent research by historians of mentalities, the author follows step by step the way in which this emergence occurs, in order to highlight the specific character of the corresponding Freudian notion.
Afterwards he imagines how psychoanalysis has gradually come to locate the gaze among the objects that govern our unconscious life. Sometimes confused with the sex, the instance of the superego or guardian, or with a partial object, it should rather be defined as a herald of the enigmatic message, condensing the sexual core of the message and impelling the subject to embody it in one way or another.
The term conversion, proposed early on by Freud, designates the passage of a psychical expression to its somatic manifestation. The author recalls why he has proposed a wider conception of this term, which would extend the capacity for conversion to include a potential that is intrinsic to the symptom as structure. He then raises the question of the status of this notion in adolescence. At this age we see not only conversions in the strict sense of the term, but the long process one must go through often assumes some feature of conversion in its larger sense. This trajectory is commented upon using a case of transitory soliloquy, already evoked in an article about shame, which is related to a conversion of the philosophical or religious type. This serves as an opportunity for pointing out the respective roles played by ideals, affect, and fantasy, the « stranger other », and especially, to be more precise about what the capacity for conversion consists of. It is a spring that ensures the containment of precocious seductions, and of the reactions to these, giving the subject the ability to regress and rebound, to close up and reopen, indispensable to anchoring him in the universe where he is called to live.
Agnès, who is in her fifties, is thinking about ending her analysis, but would like to understand why deep inside she still has the contradictory impression of being a victim, all the while feeling terribly guilty. Then she has a dream wherein she replays the way she experienced her puberty. The analysis of this dream, and of another, focused on separation, leads her perceive that she had a bad experience of this crucial moment because of her excessive attachment to her mother and because she shut herself up inside her contradictions.
Adolescent crisis as it is manifested today in the poor suburbs is often attributed to an “ illness of ideality ”. The author shows that it is not so much a lack as an excess of material ideals that prevents the adolescent from adhering to the universal values that would facilitate his integration. To show how evolution is possible, he analyses the film La promesse (“ The Promise ”), by the Dardenne brothers, wherein one can follow step by step this evolution in the process of conversion in the widest sense and analyze the important role played by reference to the maternal imago.
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