Through the exploration of a clinical case, this article will discuss what is at stake in the process of subjectivation in the adolescent, and also the obstacles that stand in the way of the process. The adolescent, confronted with internal and external otherness, tries to ensure the continuity of his identity even as he is undergoing transformation. We will show how the therapeutic encounter, as a transitional space, can foster the play of identifications and the gradual uniting of the of the split-off parts of the personality that is undergoing subjectivation.
Psychical dependence during adolescence is here approached from two angles: the Ego/other relation and the inside/outside polarity. In this passage from childhood to adulthood, the experience of separation from the object is the central component of the issue of dependence, particularly when it comes to addictions. We will try to show the paradoxical nature of separation process in adolescence, its primary and Oedipal core whose interweaving provides the basis for its impasses.
The author examines the conditions for transmission, using a clinical history to explore its prerequisites: the generation gap, an ability to face up to loss and otherness, the activation of the exogamous process, and the organization of a third function.
Adolescence, a recent category peculiar to the West, tends to disunite puberty as a universal physiological event. It is not so much the disappearance of rites that is in play here, as the extenuation of the bond of solidarity between the phenomenon of puberty and the social designation – and treatment – of adolescence. Using the example of self-harming practices in adolescence, I would like to hypothesize an increase in acts/symptoms is fed by this separation and tends, paradoxically, to reduce it – i.e., reassert a social and private recognition of identity of the forms of otherness engaged by puberty – and at the same reject these same forms of otherness.
The question at stake consists in showing and analyzing two movements of sexualization at adolescence and their vicissitudes. The former psychical movement, both chaste and » courtly » is the sine qua non condition of the latter. It enables recognition and elaboration of emotions, the surge of personal thought and the acceptance of otherness. During this first psychical movement the almost delirious illusion of belonging to both sexes is gradually left behind through the love experience using the partner as a double who is only a little dissimilar, thus enabling the subject to disentangle himself from the Oedipian parents. Thanks to such an emotional experience, the adolescent alters his links with his identenfication and love objets and becomes more aware of some of his modes of thought.
The second movement widens the capacity to learn from experience, insight, the acceptance of otherness, and enables a genital, stable and flourishing sexual closeness through the integration of psychical bisexuality.
If the model of the infantile organization of the psychical economy is the paradigm for analytical treatment, might not the model of the end-of-adolescence process be the paradigm for the “ ending ” of the analysis ? The notion of drive for control, a constituent of the psychical apparatus, once it is differentiated from the relation of control, especially its mortifying, negative aspects, will be the basis for an exploration of the processes involved in the establishment of the subject’s narcissistic foundations and, by permitting him to free himself from an alienating relationship with the primordial object, a pre-condition for his subjectivation.
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