The authors explore the specific characteristics of the double in its connection with the figure of the hero, in certain myths and in the family romance of neurotics. The exploration focuses on two things: the “heroic double” as a way of regulating incestual desires of brothers and sisters; and the construction of a “sibling romance” by the adolescent subject, which articulates love and hate towards eroticized figures of the younger sister and the brother.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 2, 379-388.
Using the concept of the family romance we explore the work of rewriting memory and reconciling affects, particularly in the adopted adolescent, with or without pathology, which enables him or her to move towards a coherent identity. This concept allows us to illustrate how the adoption situation can color the whole adolescent process, without changing the nature of it.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 695-703.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are two antinomical heros, with opposite qualities. One is elfin, the other is hulking ; one is elegant, the other is earthy. Distant descendants of Ulysses and Achilles, heroes often come in pairs, both indivisible and complementary. Does the psyche need this kind of bipartisanship ?
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 467-469.
This article tries to approach the adolescent issues of the act and its associated themes, loneliness and failure, through their psychoanalytic links with the structure of the myth of the hero. First, we will recall how Freud’s adoption of the myth of Oedipus is still a very cohesive epistemological contribution, one that still has much to teach us.
Then we will present the fundamental analogy that must be established between the circular structure of mythical causality and the oedipal process of subjectivation. Lastly, we will show that the reactivation of the Oedipus complex in adolescence reveals the deep structural link between Oedipus, the tragic hero, and modern science.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 429-438.
The hero in adolescence appears regularly in clinical practice and in literature. The infans seems to be a necessary figuration of the adolescent’s hybrid identity, a necessary passage for getting free of its control. This breaking free implies a symbolic, and particularly heroic, murder. The passage to the act should be understood as a quest for the symbolization of this murder.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 393-407.
The author uses two significant definitions of the hero by L. Ariosto and B. Fioretti to describe first, the natural need to construct, in imagination, the figure of the hero as a possible contribution to adolescent psychical functioning and as an adequate imaginary reference point for creating oneself and one’s own ars vivendi. Then, in order to highlight how the encounter with the adolescent also implies that there is something in him that goes beyond the natural process of construction inherent to development and hero-playing in childhood, the author describes three possible co-existing forces that can lead to heroism, with very different results, and which are available to adolescents. The first impulse, which is reactive, is the impulse to continue bravely seeking and recovering the values of the past ; the second impulse, which is positive and differentiating, encourages the adolescent to detach himself from the worlds that produced him and from their internal and external influences ; the third, which is creative, is the one that makes him faithful to his original sensory experiences by pushing him, unconsciously, to « do what he can ».
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 327-344.
To investigate the links between the work of adolescence and the work of the hero, the authors bring together a mythical hero, Heracles and Dostoyevsky’s adolescent hero, Arkadi.
The adolescent who emerges victorious from the trials of the pubertary and engages in the adolescens process, is a hero. This passage implies the coming together of two aporias : parricide/infanticide and mortality/immortality.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 299-312.
Making adolescence heroic involves two processes. One has to do with the creation of the intersubjectalization that constructs the ideals of adolescence ; the other places this construction in confrontation with the gaze of the infantilo-adult institutionalized as the the societal Superego.
The hero would be the one who refuses to succumb in spite of the discourse of the master which disavows him in a Lauferian breakdown, the one who stands up and pleads his adolescent case.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 281-298.