The author explores the functions of the adolescent body engaged in violent sexual acting-out behavior, using the case of Pierre, 15, who is incarcerated for rape. With reference to the third topic of C. Dejours (2003), we revisit the early phase of the relation with the primal object, then the traumatic deferred action of the pubertary, which puts to the test the topical splitting between the repressed unconscious and the forbidden unconscious that provokes violent sexual acts against the percept.
The article reflects on the specific ways of caring for adolescents who have committed acts of sexual violence and are in court-ordered treatment. Such treatments and the paradoxical forms of subjective expression they entail require us to re-think our settings and our conceptual tools in order to construct a therapeutic environment. The cases we present show how our thinking comes to resonate with feelings of breakdown, annihilation, and the possibility of leading these patients to work through psychic experiences.
Using two clinical vignettes (one from an institutional therapeutic treatment, and the other from an individual treatment), the author investigates issues underlying the apparently “liberated” sexuality of two older adolescents: a tight, reciprocal clinging to the mother, in the absence of internalization of parental imagos that would enable true individuation. He calls attention to the psychopathological and therapeutic consequences of this.
This paper concerns clinical work with sexual aggression experienced in adolescence, in the fright and bewilderment after the violation. We first revisit the issue of the revival specific to post-traumatic repetition of trauma, hypothesizing the existence of a traumatic latency period when the prevailing traumatic process would suspend the subject’s work of readjustment, bonding, and symbolization. Can such aggressions and their fixed yet active psychic aftermath, characterized by the return of the identical, be joined with registers of fantasy proper to adolescence and to the transformation of the body in puberty? Or are we dealing with two internal foreign bodies, opening on their own and attacking the subject when the latter is caught between a rock and a hard place?
The French study on sexual aggressors that took place between 1993 and 1996 in eighteen regional medico‑psychological wards compares two kinds of pupulations. One of sexual aggressors and another of aggressors in terms of voluntary blows (witnesses). Such a study shows that the sexual aggressors had been in the past children and adolescents far better integrated than the witnesses within the school circuits. Yet, very early, analyses of their nightmares show with this population a feeling of severe insecurity leading to far more psychological or psychiatric consultations for sleep disorders both in childhood and in adolescence. Among the motives for consultations (which are twice as many as those demanded from the group of witnesses) one can already find out specific sexual behaviours and typical sexual aggressions. Severe sadistic relationships and a premature tendency to serious crualty towards animals (even pets) are one of the major characteristics of sexual agressors. The other major characteristic is that, in one case out of three, a sexual aggression before the age of ten which will be in 75% of the cases repeated in the course of childhood or of adolescence. Yet the analysis of the beginnings of the sexual life of such subjects shows that a greater number of them have been the victims of sexual abuse by either men or women from their surrounding without their being able to analyze such acts as being aggressive. This leads the author to suggest the hypothesis according to which there would exist for such subjects of a “ continuous primary seduction ” in which the aggression act, usually presented as an “initiation” would thus become a “logical” achievement. Finally, such a study shows that acting sexual aggression works as an anti‑depressant from adolescence onwards.
The French study on sexual aggressors that took place between 1993 and 1996 in eighteen regional medico-psychological wards compares two kinds of pupulations. One of sexual aggressors and another of aggressors in terms of voluntary blows (witnesses). Such a study shows that the sexual aggressors had been in the past children and adolescents far better integrated than the witnesses within the school circuits. Yet, very early, analyses of their nightmares show with this population a feeling of severe insecurity leading to far more psychological or psychiatric consultations for sleep disorders both in childhood and in adolescence. Among the motives for consultations (which are twice as many as those demanded from the group of witnesses) one can already find out specific sexual behaviours and typical sexual aggressions. Severe sadistic relationships and a premature tendency to serious crualty towards animals (even pets) are one of the major characteristics of sexual agressors. The other major characteristic is that, in one case out of three, a sexual aggression before the age of ten which will be in 75% of the cases repeated in the course of childhood or of adolescence. Yet the analysis of the beginnings of the sexual life of such subjects shows that a greater number of them have been the victims of sexual abuse by either men or women from their surrounding without their being able to analyze such acts as being aggressive. This leads the author to suggest the hypothesis according to which there would exist for such subjects of a » continuous primary seduction » in which the aggression act, usually presented as an ´initiationª would thus become a ´logicalª achievement. Finally, such a study shows that acting sexual aggression works as an anti-depressant from adolescence onwards.
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