The purpose of this article is to conceptualize the phenomenon of violence using a mixed method: a review of history and literature will be brought to bear on clinical methodology. The hypothesis demonstrated is that violence dwells in the interstices between the subject and the social, and emerges from defects in the symbolic system, in the case of adolescence, crime, and “madness.” Work on violence as a responseto what remains beyond the symbolic thus strives for meaning, to prevent the violence of one from becoming the violence of all.
Having recalled the definition of the rite not only from the anthropological, but also from a psychoanalytical point of view and the articulation between these two aspects, the author of this article seeks, first in a general way, then by focusing more specifically on adolescent processes, to make a distinction between ritual and rite. He relates the first to conservation and unbinding, while placing the second on the side of depressiveness and subjectivation, with a call for progression in a temporal interval. The rite appears to belong essentially to the symbolic function, as a waiting solution, an area of reassurance which, from a dynamic point of view has a ludic dimension through a wish to break with repetitive mechanisms. The rite, at the crossroads of circular time and linear time appears as a « meta-stable » state which seeks not so much to make sense as to avoid a too sudden exit from the world of childhood.
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