Ph. Gutton has coined two concepts for speaking of the changes that happen at the onset of puberty. The pubertaire emphasizes the violence and the breaking-in that occur both somatically and psychically. The adolescens expresses the work of psychical elaboration which the drive-surge of the pubertaryrequires in order to resist the dangers of the Ego’s unity shattering (psychosis) and of breakdown (depression). Ph. Gutton has called these two movements the adolescent process.
This article presents a theoretical framework for thinking about seemingly psychotic manifestations in adolescence. Between the archaic and the actual, the paradigm of pubertary psychosis frees itself from hasty references to the risk of schizophrenia and gives new value to the notion of potentiality as a process. Pubertary psychosis turns out to have an eminently borderline character and its symptoms necessitate ways of treatment that cover the spectrum of a work of the negative that is necessary but uncertain.
Analytic work with the adolescent implies the elaboration of various forms of attraction and repulsion of the originary and the infantile. The author tries to pinpoint the different stages of subjectivation. This article will emphasize the gradual establishment of the reality principle, a passage that is closely tied with the physiological quest for the sexual object. The analyst’s function consists of enlisting the adolescent’s own capacity for imagining and daydreaming in the service of thought.
Slam is a new poetic art form involving performance that has been taken up by young people. This poetry-performance responds to the need for narcissistic support and the conquest of new spaces in adolescence, when the field of language is invested as a breaking away from the mother tongue and the normative tongue. It enables young people to confront otherness by sublimating their aggressive drives through the common esthetic object they identify with and in which they exercise their creativity.
This article discusses the hypothesis that, in contemporary society, the Oedipus complex is more complex but still exists as a central organizer of the psyche. A debate with anthropological views – in particular with avec Françoise Héritier and her theory of « incest of the second type » (between a mother and daughter who have the same lover) – leads to a re-problematization of the notions of primary homosexuality, intersubjectivity and thirdness. Thus the issue of differentiation can be better conceived in relation to subjectivation : does incest hold the risk of a psychotizing undoing of differentiation ? What about psychical disorders in adolescence marked by phenomena of regression towards group situations dominated by borderline functioning ? The identical evoked by Françoise Héritier does not totally correspond with narcissistic libidinal economy. It is necessary to revive the historic dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology (A. Green and J. Lacan with C. Lévi-Strauss, and more recently, the exchanges between M. Godelier and B. Juillerat), starting with a reflection on the paternal function today, extending the critical discussion of the theory of incest of the second type, and an example of a traditional society without fathers and contemporary neo-parenthood. It would appear that the oedipal triangle can take various forms.
The author tries to conceive of a psychoanalytical conception of intersubjectivity that would respect the double reference to the unconscious and to infantile sexuality. He believes it is necessary to emphasize the “ messenger ” value of the drive and its modes of representing. Two clinical vignettes show how the drive is composed or decomposed according to the response of the other-subject object, as well as the unconscious dimensions of the messages acted out in the face-to-face setting. Then a decomposition of different “ bits ” of the experience of satisfaction opens up the question of infantile sexuality which includes the other-subject in its organization. The question of adolescence is revisited as the moment when infantile sexuality is found again, and redefined as a function of adolescent sexuality’s “ body-to-body ”, but also as the danger of confusion associated with this find.
The problems of the intersubjective linnk do not coincide with the concepts of intrapsychical binding, of identification and object-relationship. From the psychoanalytical point of view, the consistency of the link is the specific unconscious psychical reality built by the meeting of two or several subjects. In terms of process, the link is the more or less stable movement of the investments, the representations and the actions which associate two or several subjects for the fulfilment of some their desires, or the deployment of common defences. Distinct from that which organizes the intrapsychical space of the singular subject, the logic of the link is that of the reciprocal implications, inclusions and mutual exclusions. The author defines the requirements of psychic work necessary to establish a link. He shows the epistemological stakes of a « third topic », heard like that of the intersubjectivity in his relationship with the internal space of the subjects of the link.
After a review of some examples of epistemological dialogue between neurosciences and psychoanalysis (such as the theory of delayed-action effect seen in light of current findings about memory, the activeness of perceptions, dream and different kinds of memory, representations of action and recent discoveries in neuro-imaging, infantile amnesia and the movement from analog to digital communication, the theory of mind in light of projective identification), the author considers the problematic of intersubjectivity in connection with the question of polysensorial synchrony, before concluding with an evocation of some obstacles that stand in the way of this transdisciplinary dialogue.
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