Defining “helping to grow up” as a way of supporting the capacity for investment, this paper works at the crossroads of anthropology and psychoanalysis to show how traditional rites of passage to adulthood can support the formation of the “I” and how spaces for elaboration become necessary to ensure this function when the external world has trouble providing symbolic certainty.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 135-144.
The rite is an object at the crossroads of the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. We will be careful to emphasize what differentiates it from habit or repetition. The rite is a passage and an experience. If it is a rite of passage, then it allows for changes of otherness, and also helps bind the subject to the sexual law and the collective mythology. Adolescence in Western societies, which tends to spread throughout the world, is developing new trends and ways ritualizing as the symbolic frameworks between rite and myth tend to become disjointed. The author raises the question of the psychical functions of rituality in adolescence.