In studies on trans identity, sexuality is still largely unexplored territory. While sex and gender cover heterogenous data, it is hard not to hear the intertwining questions. The author relies on what transitioning or gender-fluid youths, or those who seeking to escape being categorized as man/woman, homo/hetero, cis/trans, are saying about their sexual practices. How does the agency of these bodies undergoing transformation fit into the development of our theories?
Since the dawn of the digital, classic representations of sexuality have been displaced on the web. Porn has thus appeared, with its increasingly trafficked images. Children and adolescents are confronted with these unfiltered, sometimes traumatic images. How do social media deal with these images in order to protect them? In what ways has porn evolved? What is one to think about the emergence of #porn on social media, as it relates to entry into the adult world?
Using initial interviews with an adolescent girl who presents self-attacking behaviors, the author explores the orders of the vital and the sexual, and the fate of aggressive drives in light of Freud’s two topographies.
Using an encounter with an adolescent girl who committed an act of violence directed at the face, this article will discuss the role of the face and that of the disfiguring movement in the sexuation process of the adolescent girl. In its continuity with the body, the face is subjected to the violence of the pubertary process and to the demands of the work of the feminine. Failure to integrate a sexually differentiated face can lead to anxieties of disfigurement and defenses relating to the face, or else to acts of disfiguring violence.
Few studies in the field of autism up till now have attempted to describe how the adolescent process acts on its subjects. In this article, we offer a reading of some fundamental concepts about adolescence from the work of Freud and Philippe Gutton in light of knowledge about autism based on the works of G. Haag, R. Roussillon, D. Meltzer, M. Rhode et D. Anzieu that help understand archaic functioning.
Compared with their male peers, girls commit few delinquent acts. But crimes and misdemeanors are not the only expression of violence and transgression that girls must deal with, either actively or passively. The various forms raise the question of whether certain modes of violent or non-violent transgression are specific to females and how they should be handled by the social welfare and judicial systems. This semiological puzzle is an open field for new research.
In the context of grave illness, the specific qualities of the work of ordinary adolescence are tinted with problems inherent to the sick body, especially the control of the biological dimension and its lethalness. Two recent novels help us to understand how the resulting psychical and fantasy configurations infiltrate pubertary reorganizations in which appear issues of the sexual, sexuality, and romantic love in adolescence.
Focusing on the time of middle school and high school, the author revisits Freud’s adolescence using texts and documents that have not been published in France. These documents, like the few thoughts written down in the young Freud’s school journal, also place Freud in the political context of his time. The central hypothesis of this article holds that Freud was an adolescent confronted with intense passions which are related to certain discoveries linked to the foundation of psychoanalysis.
The very large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis in a festive – or recreational – way do not, of course, have an addictive relationship with “ joints ”. But it is interesting to note that the use of this product is never far from various aspects of the conflict that constitutes adolescent crisis : in addition to providing an alternative – or a complement – to alcohol-induced intoxication, it is a matter of modifying in a limited way what is thought and felt, so as to improve relations with other adolescents, familiarize oneself with desire and first sexual experiences, facilitate manifestations of humor and, sometimes, manage excessive sensitivity and disturbing sexual and aggressive fantasies. Psycho-educational interviews permit these adolescents to question more generally the malaise peculiar to their age, its relational consequences and the manner in which they try to remedy it. In this, the family may usefully be associated with the treatment.
The increasing number of requests for the institutional management of adolescents indicates either that adolescent crises have become more severe, or that the present forms of family organization render these families incompetent to manage the adolescents by themselves. This demand may be explained in part by the lack of procedures marking the passage to adulthood. Much adolescent behavior, in fact, re-enacts failed attempts at initiation rites. Work with adolescents can only be enriched and improved by knowledge of rites of passage practiced by traditional societies. The framework for containing violence and sexuality offered by these rites, the procedures for affiliation with the adult world which they implement, the re-elaboration of the symbolic which they impel, etc., make it possible to shed light on certain barriers that confront institutions for adolescents on a regular basis.
Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 489-498
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