In his preface to F. Wedekind’s play, Spring Awakening, J. Lacan defended several theses, not only about adolescence, but also about what adolescence reveals and that is applicable to all. We will focus in particular on one of these theses: there is no initiation. From there, we will attempt to isolate the basis of the difficulty, and at the same time the necessity, of the adolescent’s detachment from the knowledge of the parental Other.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 347-356.
Although J. Lacan rarely discussed the theme of adolescence as such, his analysis of the Dora case, can allow us to underscore three characteristics of the adolescent process: the traumatic impact of the encounter with the desire of the Other, the attempt to cover up the sexual with knowledge and the quest for a stable position towards sex identification. The revealing of the inadequacy of knowledge during adolescence refers us to the structural incompleteness of the symbolic and to a part of the real that the symbolic cannot absorb.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 319-331.
In psychoanalysis, the distinction between truth and knowledge has implications beyond the theoretical sphere. It is also essential in the clinical context. The adolescent crisis, as Lacan following in Freud’s footsteps suggests, involves « questioning truth as though it were knowledge ». This sort of questioning allows a young person at an impasse to use knowledge in order to produce a new formalization.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 279-287.
The authors study the function of the gaze and its clinical issues in the adolescent’s confrontation with the Real of the sexual by means of two clinical cases in which the gaze crystalizes trauma after the confession of a sexual transgression to the Other.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 199-208.
Female patients suffering from anorexia nervosa often have their own specific way of dealing with learning and knowledge. It is therefore observed that the school or university environment becomes a good place for expression, stage setting and repetition of anorexic symptoms. We shall pinpoint the impasses and the attempts at care-giving on specific occasions in these pathologies where food and school alienation go together.
School, both the symbolical organisation of the social body and the setting up/building up of the individual, operates on the relations between power and desire. But this way of looking at the structuring of people’s craving for knowledge must be combined with an analysis of School and of the relationships to the Other that are generated by the Academic Institution. Then this process will make it possible to assess the understanding of the Discontents of the French School Institution as the actor/promoter of a monistic republican Citizenship. In the French social system within which school plays the part of leaven, the Other must turn into the Same. Through this, we can understand how tense relationships at school are.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 655-672
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.