The adolescent passage is paradoxical. On the one hand, the young person positions himself as a subject by and for the rupture with the domestic cultural universe ; on the other hand, he will often return to repressed cultural elements of the preceding generation in order to construct his future. This is a sharp and very visible paradox when we are dealing with contexts of migration, but it is inherent to every adolescent process, whether « migrant » or « native ». This article uses C. Lévi-Strauss’ notion of « mythopoetic language » to explore the translations of this paradox in adolescents’ particular way of modeling language and of speaking.
Virginia Woolf’s writing reflects an intimate, radical engagement in the feminine, which interests us here insofar as it seems inseparable from her listening, as writer and as the child searching for meaning that she was, listening for the places engendered in speech, however fragmentary. In To the Lighthouse the maternal feminine is the voice of the mother V. Woolf lost on the threshold of her adolescence. The reminiscence of words heard, the ear straining to capture a state of language anterior to conscious representation, to catch its primordial, unconscious rhythm, provides the tension and musicality of the writing. In the paper here presented we shall concentrate upon the mnesic trace of aural memory which founds the movement of the writing while sketching out a back-stage maternal-echolalic scene in which the sounds of words are heard and exchanged.
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