The tectonic forces of romantic passion are evoked as after effects of the original human trauma: its distress, its inscription in language, its nostalgia for the fusion with and loss of parental ideals, its relationship with the Oedipal taboo… These are various ways of going “through the psychical looking-glass” that await the adolescent. This article will discuss the links between romantic passion, control, desire and the role of Kairos, of chance, of detail and partial objects, as well as emptiness and mourning affects, in the triggering of passion.
The death wishes dealing with the same sex parent usually stay in the fantasmatic sphere and can’t find an acted way. How integrate the symbolic murder of a father died in an accident, who was felt on intense ambivalence before his death ? It is the Paul situation, young man of nineteen years old ; the extracts of his psychotherapy show hom the maintenance of the father idealization, becomed an idol, contribute to inelaborate this loss.
The adolescent, caught within the snares of the first love is struck by a brutal narcissistic breaking in, but he is less disillusioned than the adult by the object’s desiring reality. He knows his desire is fed upon his own self. He will indeed be disillusione and will have to mourn this first love.
Every adult keeps in mind the nostalgia of such a first love which will serve as reference within the vicissitudes of every man’s or woman’s fate.
The surge of HIV in the paediatric field shattered the life and future of families. It followed a reverse path with reference to the progress that could have been made in the approach of the consequences of separations, death and illnesses of any one relative, parent or child. It forced us to have new conceptions about life such as : the desire of a child, giving birth and life, bringing up, protecting, guiding, keeping alive, helping to live and helping to die. The mother, one of the children, sometimes the father, all wage a merciless war against the illness, against discrimination, isolation, the secret, pain, fear of death. Confronted to such an earthquake, the author questioned herself on what those infected children may or may not feel at adolescence. Through these clinical vignettes and what children say about themselves, the author tries to show what a tragical ordeal they are confronted to. How do they survive to such a slaughter ? How do they or don’t they achieve theyr task of mourning ? What memories do they keep or are they allowed to keep about their fathers, and/or their mothers ? What kind of personal history will they build therefrom ? What kind of guilt is their stake ? So many questions for which sometimes there are no specific answers ? The recent progress in the therapeutic field brought changes that are both synonyms of hope and of pain.
First we have to specify in what way war changes the psychic life of young Subjects – most of them teenagers – then we shall have to insist on the difficulties they encounter in their social and professional reinsertion. These difficulties come out because of the reputation they have acquired for being « sorcerers ». We shall examine how this categorization, which is quickly expanding in the two Congos, crystallizes ; we shall also study the effects of this notion on these subjects’ disconnection from the usual logics of alliance and filiation.
The virtual is often criticized as a new addictive substance for adolescents. Here we will take the point of view according to which this tool fosters the elaboration of depressive capacity before their is a playing of the « I » (mise en je) in the real. Screen and body of the subject, the computer would be a first place of symbolization, on the way to genuine subjectivation. Leading to another space and another time, the virtual first allows one to approach in a different way the issue of temporality in its relation to loss. Since loss of the object engenders the « I », how might the virtual be another place where absence can be appropriated ? How can it help in the movement from intemporality to atemporality ? This idea will be illustrated by the case of an autistic youth as an archetype of the issue of loss and the passage from the imaginary to the real. Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 417-427.
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