An adolescent’s demand for support in undertaking medical transitioning goes against traditional psychoanalytic theories. In this article, the author gives an overview of the metaphors that occur most frequently in discussions about gender transitioning. Through the notions of contagion, naturalness of gender, and amputation, he will attempt to reveal the anxieties of analysts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the anxieties of the psychoanalysis as a theoretical field.
Here the author will evaluate the implications for treatment of adolescents’ first sexual experiences. These first relations bring forth aggression fantasies, since they embody the link between sexuality and destructiveness in a special way, even when they are consensual. The author hypothesizes that the violence of the infantile sexual permeates these relations, reactivated by the traumatic character that the first sexual relation always has because of its radical newness.
What “living traces” of Freud’s adolescence can be found in his psychoanalytical theories? Florian Houssier, the author of Freud adolescent, discusses this with Philippe Gutton. Although Freud worked on the metamorphosis of puberty, he seems always to relegate adolescent sexuality either to the infantile or to adult neurosis. Florian Houssier considers that some clues gleaned from a reading Freud’s work suggest that a part of his adolescence was repudiated: scenarios, sensorial details, masturbatory fantasies … Philippe Gutton responds regarding the “sexual” dimension of the pubertary process.
Starting from the psychoanalytic cure of a young adult, this paper tries to delineate the traces of the passage towards the adult stage beyond adolescence. The patient is of an hysterical nature with a psychosomatic dimension and a tendency to actings. The cure enabled as a differed action the process of elaboration of puberty hindered afore.
The way the multifold infantile pregenital partial drives may be recaptured within a « polyphonic » genital synthesis is here studied. Adult subjectivization is fed with the closeness of the infantile sexual, the best way to avoid a defensive and unauthentic adult structuration would thus be to tolerate some part of childhood and adolescence in one self.
Both differences and resemblances between FreudÕs and KleinÕs theories on infantile sexuality will here illustrate the vision their followers have on adolescence.
Even if theoretical positions diverge, they may become richer for a better understanding of adolescent processes and their pathologies. The author here gives an example of such a situation by quoting the importance of Moses and Eglé LauferÕs theoretical points of views on the breakdown and experience of bodily transformations at adolescence and of those of the post-KleiniansÕ about the projective and introjective identification processes and the analysis of unconscious fantasies dealing with introjected objects.
Using the analytical treatment of Sabrina, with reference to the Oedipal model and the notion of the plurality of aspects of the subject, the authors attempt to show the binding that language accomplishes during psychical organization in adolescence, in order to suggest the operational and functional aspect of the adolescent’s narrative. This rational narrative is defensive, both against infantile sexuality and against the disintrication of the drives, while allowing the adolescent to regain access to negation and judgment of truth as he acquires a certain degree of independence from the pleasure principle and also from repression.
This proposal will be supported by the passage from the use of « tu » to the use of « vous » in adolescence : the moment when « one » becomes « several ».
There are two modes of theorization that divide the favor of clinicians : one based on the theory of attachment and the other emblematized by infantile sexuality. Both appear to offer inarguable clinical benefits and yet they seem opposed to each other. Perhaps it would suffice to wait for an elaboration of the « narcissism of small differences » to do its work for a third form of theorization to subsume, in a third utterance, the ones that appeared contradictory or antagonistic. It is a matter of designating the particular modalities of interiorizing the subjective experience of the relation with oneself and with the other, the other who is so different from oneself, and to bring it forward. Can it be thought that the way in which the subjective experience will be interiorized is totally different from this?
The progressive disintegration in our modern societies of family systems and of the prohibition of incest allows us a theoretical step. If, outside of any family relationship, this double erasure has brought out the sexual crime as such – that is, the sexual abuse “ between the adults and the child ” (Ferenczi), this could be the sign the interdict did at all times try to contain – without being completely able to do so – the polymorphous and unbound sexuality present not only in the infant but in the infantile unconscious of the adult.
This article suggests that the them of migration be considered as a metaphor for an interior psychical operation : the subjectalizing differentiation from the primary objects, which play a decisive role in adolescence. The issue of the subject is treated within a dialogue with sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers, to the point of envisioning a plural subject open to the diversity of libidinal economies – characterized by the omnipresence of psychical bisexuality and infantile sexuality, here related to gender theory.
Migration introduces one to mixing – ethnic, cultural, but also psychical. A clinical example of adolescent psychical disorder generating elaboration and symbolization of interior strangeness illustrates the hypothesis : we are all migrants.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°3, pp. 661-672.
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