The 2018 publication of S. Ferrières-Pestureau’sLa violence à l’œuvre (Violence at work) provides a spot-on illustration of the way that art at different times periods has taken up what exceeds the various declensions of the human body that translates its violence. The author of this article relates major events of western history to the pictorial representations that either interpreted or provoked them, noting new perceptions of violence arising from the body.
The author presents the activities of the “Collège Aquitain de Psychopathologie de l’Adolescent” (CAPA) and investigates the malaise of today’s adolescents, caught between the identificatory impasses and a lack of historical perspectives. The article then discusses clinical treatments.
The presentation of an article by Freud on adolescence opens up an essential field of historical research, making Freudian theory appear as work not self-engendered but rather biography-created.
The way one moves from the state of childhood to that of adulthood in the course of puberty has evolved very much throughout history. The body’s physiological changes have most often been correlated with the subject’s statutory and juridical change. One must observe that this is no longer the case and that, since its creation in the middle of the 19th century, adolescence keeps lengthening, to the detriment of the latency phase before it and of the accession to maturity after it. The difficulties this situation causes for adolescents should incite us to question it and suggest that the age of majority be lowered.
The paper wishes to distinguish three different patterns within love experience at adolescence. The first, i.e. the most classical one, puts forward the drive-narcissistic problematics with the regressive capacity within the object relation. The second, which is sensitive to the enacting within a condensed form of adolescent love stories sequenced differently, i.e. re-discovered differently. The third develops the idea that adolescent love flourishes with reference to a fictitious third partner, always a parental one. Every experience builds a new third-person approach whose mission consists in self-interpretation of adolescences in process.
In the 19th century the Bible suggested a new approach of the human body to the Merinas who were the most powerful and most evalized kingdom in Malagasy. Christianism was supposed to inspire them towards an integration into » civilization « . Some ancestral institutions, believed to be adverse to the new traditions were given up. Yet, the » carnal need « , which was the neologism by which the missionaries defined lust remained insensitive to the christianization of the customs. The Merinas used sexuality as a field for resistance, confronted as they were to the fear of a total seizure of their identity by the Westerners. Whether it be amid the royal family or with common people, the actors were mainly adolescents : their behaviour had been approved by their parents.
The frequency of military engagement of adolescents in genocide raises the question of a possible parallel between the processes involved in war and those mobilized in adolescence. This leads to the question of the possible resonance between individual psychical processes and social processes, along the lines of what Freud introduced in Civilization and Its Discontents. Here the intersection of processes would occur around the act as a substitute for a failure of trans-generational transmission in childhood, either within the family or within the social milieu.
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