The question of gender has moved to the forefront of politics and has even become an issue of culture, or indeed, civilization. It is stimulating to confront two types of extreme attitude towards anatomical sexual difference: that of J. Butler, extending the disavowal of anatomical difference and those of the rituals of excision and circumcision, which try to increase the difference by created an « enhanced reality ». Psychotherapies show how the adolescent’s problematic can meet with these same disavowals for internal reasons, not just cultural ones.
Following the collapse of revolutionary utopias, Iranian adolescents develop through their active role as voluntary enlistees in the Iran-Iraq war a “ culture of death ”, wherein the quest for the identity of martyr takes the place of a process of subjectivation.
Fundamentalist Islamic ideology and war fanaticism induce behaviors of narcissistic withdrawal, which prevent these youths from attaining the dimension of adult sexuality and going on from there to appropriate a discourse for themselves within a repressive society.
Through the clinical case of a former adolescent soldier, this article tries to show how this war has become the only response – in the form of an impasse – to adolescent processes for thousands of young Iranians.
We believe that the resurgence of the adolescent process in the adult treatment is not simply a mode of regressive, defensive functioning, but rather an ever active mode of functioning that can result from highly secondarized ways of functioning. The hypothesis is that one never repeats, in the proper sense of the term, in an identical way, but that there is always a conjunction with one’s current mode of being. What is really modified is the passage from growing up to growing old. Adult functioning must pass through the filter of adolescence, not only genitalitized sexualization that this implies, but also a temporal organization that includes death.
In the context of neo-liberalism and the collapse of social meta-frameworks, the disavowal of generational difference provokes a crisis in cultural transmission at school by avoiding the conflictual nature of Oedipal conflicts and attacking psychical and cultural organizers. Adolescent suffering, violence and transgression should be understood as symptoms and consequences of the political idealization of perversion and of regression to the infantile in the socio-historical situation.
The author, following Michel Foucault, describes how the art of governing presupposes the interests of the State are more and more imposed on the populace in the management of existences and private matters. To do this, Power sets up security systems by manipulating public opinion and making a tool of the sciences. “Experts” become the scribes of these new market economy servitudes, which gently and insidiously standardize individuals and populations. Medicine, psychiatry and psychology are, in this article, considered as social practices and the author shows that the re-composition of their knowledge and practices has more to do with an ideological position than with a scientific one.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 271-295.
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