Man has dreamed of mastering his psychic, ecological and virtual environment, through a frantic race against any form of limit, whether of time, of space, of resources or of the body. The current situation undermines the narrative of man as center of the universe, as he is forced to acknowledge that he is peripheral in relation to what he presumed to dominate. Would the parental generation thus be paying tribute to adolescents for saving them from humiliation? How, then, can one inhabit one’s body and psyche, if the promised future is the end screen?
Using clinical encounters with contemporary artists (in this case, Boris), we explore the place of the body in creation, through the notion of rhythm. Rhythm is not limited to rhythmicity or tempo, nor measure alone; rather, it bears witness to the incarnation of internal movement. It is in its incarnation that rhythm exists, in time with the body of the drives that it expresses. The created work will be its echo.
Every thing that sounds both attacks and builds the adolescent. It represents one of the devices used by violence in the course of puberty : now adestructive one on the puberty side and, rather, an elaborative one when on the side of the adolescens process. Being a stamp of the adolescent space, a seat for group identifications, a containin and protecting envelope enabling the adolescent to be safely confronted to the threat of its piberty fantasies, everthing higt-sounding expresses violence at adolescence whilst shaping it at same time.
The postulate of the central place of rhythm in psychical life prompts us to spot rhythm issues in clinical practice, and especially in the treatment of adolescent problems where disinvestment is coupled with suspension of time. Two vignettes from day-hospital practice are offered to illustrate how institutional care can, in its own way, take up the challenge of re-animating the desiring, temporal dynamic of the subject through the dynamic of his internal rhythmicity.
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