Nowadays, the metamorphoses of Éros are causing us to rethink the thesis according to which sexual binarism is the key to the order of the symbolic. The corpus of psychoanalysis and even more so the practice of psychoanalysis have been rocked by this. How can we keep analytical listening and intervention alive, and maintain the connection between analysis and what is happening in the field of culture? Could a dialogue with anthropology help with this?
Adolescence, 2023, 41, 2, 339-351.
The real is not merely the excess that invades or overwhelms us; it is also what is not perceived as not having been sufficiently given and which always eludes us. On the individual and collective scale, it takes the form of economic rationale and unrealistic positivism.
Art, as a falsification of the real, is a useful remedy, or even a rescue, in helping to ward off the prevailing economism that disenchants our reality by enabling a reinvention of oneself and the world. But it veers into absurdity and destructiveness if it does not remain tangential to the external and internal limits of the real. There can be only one indication for psychoanalysis today: disenchantment in the face of the real. It offers an adventure it offers to the subject who wishes to taste the vitality of truth and freedom, to be free to confront pain and surmount it in order not to be “really” afraid.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 69-94.
This text shows how a psychoanalyst in Paris hears the way that young people, boys and girls, are seduced by the appeal of jihad. These young people are not fanatics. They are consulting a psychoanalyst on the advice of friends or family members. The author describes the significant identity issues and psychological wounds of these young people, but also their ideals and hopes.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 2, 291-303.
Lacan’s theory involves the critique of psychogenetic approaches to the Oedipus complex. Lacan’s focus on the Father and castration further accentuates Freud’s favoring of a phylogenetic approach. Adolescence is a time of disappointment of Oedipal aspirations, when it turns out that genitality does not provide a relationship to the Other. This illustrates the lesser importance for Lacan of the Oedipus complex as a means to analyze adolescent processes.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 261-270.
What place do new communication technologies have in analytic protocol? Is it possible to carry out analytic work, conduct a “session” digitally, when this work is by nature apart from classic social relations and the usual forms of pressure and domination? The analytic stage-setting guarantees a stopping of panoptical ways of seeing. What are the “digital” possibilities of analytic treatment?
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 3, 523-533.
By means of a case study, the authors demonstrate the importance of a psycho-phenomenological therapeutic setting, which brings together a phenomenological component, where work that enacts primal processes in and through movement, and a psychoanalytical component where primary and secondary processes can be endowed with representation. The proposed psychotherapy enables the adolescent, who is locked into passages to the act, to metabolize his aggressiveness in a new way.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 2, 363-376.
The metapsychological status of adolescence as a psychoanalytic concept becomes meaningful with the definition of adolescence as already described by the author in his previous works.
Hence, the clinical approach evidences the insufficiency, on the one hand of the traditional conceptions according to which the use of the concept of symptom aims at multiplying personality profiles in the new psychopathological group of borderline states and, on the other hand, of the approach as described within the structure of the borromean knot as suggested by lacan.Resting on his latest works on the borderline state conceived as a « state » rather than as a « structure », hence being liable to be present in any structure, and which rests on the concept of « limit », the author insists on the distinction between behaviours and symptoms at adolescence and suggests that adolescence should be considered as a logical time of construction for the sinthôme and borderline states as provisional or fixed states that are specifically unstable of such a sinthôme. He here closes his paper with a few notes on the study of the qualities of such a sinthôme.
The account of three consultations concerning an arrogant teen-ager with a feeling of nullity enables us to consider the psychoanalytical process. Place is given to the psychoanalyst’s work of thought, about the emotional states of the subject that emerge in the treatment, but also those of the parents in the initial consultations. There is violence because of an attributive judgment coming from the parental objects in earliest childhood, which the adolescent unwittingly picks up, a fate that we regard as a clash between infancy and adolescence. We describe a concept – the distress of object – and reflect upon the feeling of nullity so frequent at this age.
The authors of this article study the implications of thinking of the psychoanalytical treatment as an adolescent process and investigate the link between this process, the political and the therapeutic arrangement. Their reflection is based on two clinical situations around the Id (in the Freudian sense), identification and the ideal are intertwined. The text first tries to show that adolescence is a relevant model for conceiving of the treatment. It then relates adolescence to the political showing that both share a certain kind of relationship with utopia, adolescence characterizing the potential flexibility between Id, identification and ideal. In conclusion, the case of Irma presents an investigation into the analyst’s place between the political, adolescence and treatment which, between repression and the demand for satisfaction, calls into question the edifice of the ideal.
Interviews, first semi-directive, afterwards freeform, with subjects using gay dating sites have allowed us to pinpoint a certain number of particularities of types of unconscious dares, involving both their own fantasy life and their family history, concomitant with risk-taking that led to infection with the AIDS virus. These interviews also allowed some subjects who participated in them a better perception of their vital choices, and an opportunity to put into perspective the conclusions that partly determined their risk-taking.