Looking at several field studies in West Africa and Southeast Asia, this article will attempt to show the feelings of shame and hate which can be such a hindrance when the subject, excluded from social links by political and social violence, is asked to find a new foundation in the threads of a dialogue in which the logic of legitimacy, affiliation and kinship could be reconfigured.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 311-321.
À partir de plusieurs terrains en Afrique de l’Ouest et Asie du Sud-Est, cet article vise à étager les affects de honte et de haine qui ne manquent pas de s’exaspérer lorsque le sujet, naguère mis en dehors du lien social par des violences sociales et politiques, se retrouve convié à retrouver assise dans les fils d’un dialogue possible au sein duquel se reconfigurent les logiques des légitimités, des affiliations et des filiations.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 311-321.
In educational institutions the adolescent body occupies both formal and informal space and time, within the social space devoted to them. It is dictated by schedules, rhythms and learning activities. The relationship with knowledge and thought originates in the body, and yet the institution denies it in its drive reality. This article will explore this hypothesis through observations carried out in a French high school.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 4, 757-769.
Through a large number of psychiatric emergencies (540 under age 18 in 2001), we explore the relation between the passage to the act and the emergency situation in adolescence: doesn’t modern psychiatry tend to define a psychiatry of the act ? The latter depends on internal causes at adolescence, but also on the environment. The work with these situations is then defined both by the constitution of an emergency service as an interior setting and by the development of an exterior network. The evolution of a ward for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in adolescence can thus be described.
Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 571-579
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
The analysis of a portion of a non-directive interview with a young adolescent leads the author to consider the institutional setting as an instance of reflectivity, whose function of limiting desire is not control over the subject but rather a way of helping him to escape from the psychic determinations which alienate him.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 153-160.
Freud approaches the beating fantasy “a child is being beaten” as part of the psychic dynamic of every individual. It appears at the end of the infantile period and derives from the psychic modifications which take place in three phases. This fantasy is rewritten in adolescence. Striking the parent is considered to be the enacting of every adolescent’s fantasy: “I am beating my parent.” It is understood that the phases occur in a condensed way, all at the same time, carried along by the outbreak of puberty. Each phase marks a different elaboration of the separation from Oedipal figures. The reemergence of this fantasy in adolescence overwhelms the thought system, allowing strong oedipal desires to coexist while punishing another person for not stopping these fantasies.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 37-47.
The authors suggest to ponder on the topic of a rise of acted violence in the adolescent population and question the psychoanalytic understanding of destructive both heteroaggressive and self‑aggressive movements. Several theoretical positions on the topic of the death instinct, or of drive unbinding or an attempt to save a feeling of identity when violence surges are analyzed briefly, followed by two clinical vignettes. From the latter cases, they try to link the intrapsychological and family links underlying the recourse to violent actings with such subjects, as related with adolescent problematics. The temporary identification dilemma is here suggested as well as the interdependence between self‑violence and violence towards the other person.
Far more than any other period of life, adolescence is the container of a whole series of processes already inscribed within the child at birth. It is according to an adequate answer from the objects that these processes will reach full development. Violence to be will then take the shape of a life project, i.e. the expression of the superego signing the completion of adolescence. Such is not the fate of sexual aggressors. Non integrated violence leads them to let their ego being dissolved in the interplay of several processes. The aggression of the other person thus becomes a defence against an hallucinatory intrusion.
Every adolescent, at every generation, is violently caught within a social context and implied within a problematics of transmission and filiation, of debt and heritage. Whether they be alone or in a group, adolescents are actors/witnesses introducing their objects, their discourses and their types of behaviour in places where they go through. Adolescence is an unstable category, without any specific seat and which may either be appropriated or melancholized. The adolescent scene, vulnerable as it is, questions forcibly the institutions and demands that a potential space should be fit enabling the transformation of both the psychological and the social that are implied within such a passage. It is a turning point where collective and individual stakes are condensed and where violences swarm and become cristallized. The adolescent scene thus becomes a violent dramatization at the crossroads between the psychological and the social.