The adolescent process is part of a movement towards huminization. This article explores the possibility of linking the emergence of the pubertary to the register of hominization, recalling the association between adolescence and the acquisition of tools, articulated language and walking upright. This correspondence helps highlight the influence of the element of surprise with regard to the outcome, an outcome marked by the determining importance of creation. What is at stake in the re-crossing of the stage of verticalization, during the genital phase, once again shows the importance of the encounter and of the other in the heat of the adolescent passage.
This article, focusing on the issue of the adolescens process held prisoner by the bellicose mentality secreted by/secreting war, argues that the reversal of values inherent to this mentality imply deep splits between parts, especially adult and infantile, and masculine and feminine. Splitting which, as the cases of Marcel and Roch illustrate, sacrifice the the young warrior’s adolescens process upon the phallic altar.
The author pinpoints the weapon, the enemy, and the uniform as signs and basic ingredients both of Mars’ craft and of the bellicose mentality. He envisions the work of separating from the bellicose mentality in relation to the passage from weapon to tool : a passage which opens onto the values of strength, creativity and beauty that war has replaced with horror and violence – a reversal of values. For Roch and Marcel, the re-establishment of these values, corresponding to the transformation of terrors into narratives, dreams and fantasies, occurs through their experimentation of an adolescence that has been petrified until now.
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