In the context of grave illness, the specific qualities of the work of ordinary adolescence are tinted with problems inherent to the sick body, especially the control of the biological dimension and its lethalness. Two recent novels help us to understand how the resulting psychical and fantasy configurations infiltrate pubertary reorganizations in which appear issues of the sexual, sexuality, and romantic love in adolescence.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 3, 645-650.
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.
Hatred is profoundly narcissistic. It bespeaks an archaic defense, an extreme form of protection against the threat of narcissistic and psychic breakdown. It may be inoffensive or, on the contrary, aggressive and destructive, seeking to destroy otherness. In adolescence, the affective movement of hatred appears necessary with regard to the parental objects and towards the environment in general, since the adolescent has the feeling of being “frowned upon”, passivated or feminized.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 277-288.
The myth of Perseus gives rise to thoughts on the psychical crossing of adolescence. The story is off to a good start with the prediction that Perseus will try to kill his grandfather. Because of this threat, Danäe is imprisoned by her father. The symbolic third party in the mother’s head makes it possible for the adolescent to bar the way to attempts at incest. Perseus’ challenge to the king and Medusa’s offering opens the way to the romantic encounter. Who can tell what the outcome will be?
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 1, 113-122.
Using two formats of the pubertary pictogram (infantile control and pubertary elaboration), it is possible to make a clearer distinction between passion and love. Passion is characterized by a double play of abuse of phallic power to the detriment of the new sexual and, in turn, “breakdown”. Love is a special instance of the intersubjectalisation necessary for adolescent creativity. At the frontier between these states, passion can be loving and love can be passionate. Two clinical examples will be taken from the novels of Hungarian author Sandor Márai.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 1, 33-45.
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.
Idealization is considered to be among the three components of human love : « excitation, idealization, affection ». This contextualization helps us to understand better the complex and contradictory issues of the ideal. Hope is also tied to love. In descriptive terms, hope places in the future the object of love and primary satisfaction lost forever in the past. In this forward, progradient movement it seems possible to find it again in a vanishing point that recedes eternally, always out of reach. According to Freud, hope is « the hope of hallucinatory reunion with the lost object of satisfaction ». Following Freud, the author proposes a phenomenology and a metapsychology of Hope, which entails a theory of the hallucinatory, raising it to the level of a concept. A clinical example links ideal and hope: hope is born from the diminution of an idolatrous idealization. This disappearance of the hope of loving and being loved leads to despair and, in the end, death.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 151-164.
Love and death, rather than fighting against each other, sometimes meet during adolescence. In Leonce and Lena from G. Büchner, the two eponymous adolescent heroes evocate death and its associated representations, the dead child or suicide, when they meet and fall in love. Death symbolises and sums up the threat of loss that the discovery of the genital object occurs. It is called by the adolescent in order to « refresh » and produce a anticathexis of an instinct whom he fears the incestuous coloration.
The author attempts to delineate the nature of the negative in the course of the building of the love object at adolescence. Resting on the concept of a negative narcissism revealing the alteration of the functional value of the object, numerous clinical examples are here described in order to illustrate such an object misery, i.e. situations in which the object love becomes significant of a reversal on oneself within hate and shame.
Starting from the works of Roland Barthes establishing a difference between music and love discourse, the author tries to show that narrow intrications are woven between the specific time approach at adolescence, music and enamoration. If it seems quite difficult to speak of a love absent-mindedness, the adolescent care seems wholly devoted to the quest of the soul and to the search of musical melodies liable to translate such an emotion. Now, such a care, which may become obsessive, can be alleviated by means of rhythms and musical sonorities corresponding gradually to puberty feelings. The love discourse of the adolescent would then be specifically translated into his musical choices punctuating the going across puberty and adolescens process.
The listening to music would then be granted such a virtue of going along and containing the transformational movement of the love object, on condition however that the sublimation potential may be called forth by the adolescent and be used to a maturation of his aesthetical choices. By offering a harmonious rhythmicity and melodious sensory qualities, the consensual musics scanning the latency stage and the path into puberty would then, through its Apollinian virtues (a pleasure of feeling in good shape), see to the upkeep of a harmonious vision of existence, before giving way to more sophisticated and more tortured musics, with dyonisiac accents which, while they at the same time keep the myth of primitive Unity and complementarity of the sexes, open towards a tragical vision of existence.