Here we wish to delineate the contemporary social imaginary world of adolescence. Our purpose belongs to qualitative sociology, i. e. an attempt to describe phenomenologically a few signs selected as being typical but which no objective statistics would legitimate. The author wishes to find her way about the contradiction existing between the advertising exhibition of the handsome young bodies and some characteristics of adolescent aesthetics as it may be caught within their choice of self‑presentation, of music, comic strips, etc
Archives par mot-clé : Sexuality
jean laplanche : drive and instinct
The metapsychological notions of drive and instinct should be carefully distinguished. So are they in Freud’s german language, which uses both termes instinkt and trieb in an absolutely different way. However, they have always been confused since strachey’s syncretic translation of both by « instinct ». Instincts and drives are opposites in man : innate and adapted on the one side, acquired (precociously) polymorphous and anarchic on the other side. Search for appeasement (instinct) against search for excitation (drive).
In the human being, there exist instinctual behaviours of self-preservation, of which the theory of attachment has demonstrated the width, the precocity (early competencies) and the intersubjective caracter. On the other hand, in the sexual domain, instinct makes its appearance only at the puberal or prepuberal time. It is in the midst of the « silence » of sexual instinct, between birth and puberty, that the sexual drive surges and develops. It does this while leaning on the self-preservation instinct, and through the process of « generalized seduction ».
At puberty, the sexual instinct has to compromise with the infantile drive, which is, so to speak, already « in office ».
It is the infantile sexual drive, as repressed in the unconscious, that makes the object of psychoanalysis.
CHAPELIER JEAN-BERNARD: HUMOR, LOVE AND SEXUALITY IN THE ADOLESCENT CULTURE
Using an exercise book annotated by teenagers in the 4th form, this article shows how the latter enter into a problematic of sexual investment of an objectal nature, through various types of relations – narcissistic, homosexual and heterosexual – by using play and humour. Keeping a certain continuity with the obscene folklore of elementary school children, teenagers use school as a place for learning about adult sexuality away from the family, which has become unfit for sexual objectal investment, and from peer groups too much centred on homophilia.
SABOURET EMMANUELLE : THE SEPARATION OF CARAVAGGIO
There are men who remind us that the flow of history is neither unhurried nor measured. Caravaggio (1571-1610) was one of these, thanks to innovations that were so radical they changed the course of Occidental painting. A notorious troublemaker – he was convicted of murder – he never ceased painting, be it under the protection of liberal patrons or on the run from papal justice. The disparity between the suspended moments he captured on canvas and his wayward wanderings punctuated with actions suggests that, despite the seminal nature of his work, his creative powers never quite prevailed over the attraction of the abyss he staged right from his early production. The drift accelerated in later years whilst he still engaged, sheltered by his canvas, in large religious compositions, exploring themes of despair and seeking out divine release.
AHOVI JONATHAN, MORO MARIE ROSE: RITES OF PASSAGE AND ADOLESCENCE
Adolescence is often considered as a passage. In every culture, there are ways of setlling and regulating problems of passage from one status to another – among these the status of adolescent – without too much anxiety for novices and already initiated adults. In ours o-called modern societies, which are complex and culturally mixed, there seems to be a greater risk of adolescents getting lost and remain on the margins. We would like to clarify the notion of rites of passage recall their definition and functions using the work of A. Van Gennep.
VÉRONIQUE NAHOUM-GRAPPE : THE ADOLESCENT’S IMAGINARY BODY
Here we wish to delineate the contemporary social imaginary world of adolescence. Our purpose belongs to qualitative sociology, i. e. an attempt to describe phenomenologically a few signs selected as being typical but which no objective statistics would legitimate. The author wishes to find her way about the contradiction existing between the advertising exhibition of the handsome young bodies and some characteristics of adolescent aesthetics as it may be caught within their choice of self-presentation, of music, comic strips, etc.
Malanjaona M. Rakotomalala : » Carnal need » : a weapon enabling resistance to christianism with the former generations of merinas
In the 19th century the Bible suggested a new approach of the human body to the Merinas who were the most powerful and most evalized kingdom in Malagasy. Christianism was supposed to inspire them towards an integration into » civilization « . Some ancestral institutions, believed to be adverse to the new traditions were given up. Yet, the » carnal need « , which was the neologism by which the missionaries defined lust remained insensitive to the christianization of the customs. The Merinas used sexuality as a field for resistance, confronted as they were to the fear of a total seizure of their identity by the Westerners. Whether it be amid the royal family or with common people, the actors were mainly adolescents : their behaviour had been approved by their parents.
Didier Lauru : Madness of touch
The fear of Aids makes the love encounter far more complex and creates an upheaval in the relationships of adolescents in the course of their first approaches of sexuality. The mad desire to touch the other person, magnificently embodied in the love ideal, can be hindered.
The author thus wonders whether those adolescents were to repeat phylogenitically the several stages of courtly love.
Hubert Lisandre : A prevention of the angel ?
Though being a » young homosexual » does not mean a specific risk of being contaminated by Aids, it may be studied as a priviledged figure of the psychological stakes liable to guide an adequate prevention, notably as regards the reference to the Oedipian father. Gabriel’s discourse, coming from a research dealing with the unconscious dimension of prevention, enables to stress a problematic » angelism » that may be considered as a real risk factor and questions reversely the present politics of prevention as well as the position of the psychologist in front of a youth on the register of his sexuality.
Philippe Hofman : Adolescence, aids and prison
This paper tries to analyze the pathologies, behaviours, cultural hiatus and psychical representations of adolescents in prison. Such a research was conceived according to their own conception of Aids. The several multifarious associations generated by this illness stress the link existing between risk behaviours and sexual representations. Here the whole of the adolescent problematics becomes caricatural.