Reading Sophocles’ tragedies about the Labdacides family, i.e. ådipus Rex, ådipus in Colone, and Antigone gives us an example of the compulsion to repeat through a succession of violent actings as a consequence of traumatic transgenerational psychological violence. Along with the move towards subjectivization proper to adolescence, the legacy of psychological trauma may entail the subject, likewise Antigone, towards a heroic identification which, for the sake of the good cause, will however do nothing but feed the repetition of violence.
Archives par mot-clé : Violence
François Lebigot : young french soldiers put to the test in sarajevo
The French army’s new assignments (peacekeeping, interposition) though particularly trying psychologically, have shown in both the youngest and the more seasoned soldiers an astonishing capacity for dominating their own violence. The situations they have had to face in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, described here, bring together all the conditions liable to drive these subjects into uncontrollable drive overflow.
From this one could conclude that youths who join the army, often as they are emerging from a difficult adolescence, are looking for discipline, order, an ideal that would enable them to have peaceful relations with others. Because of the place and the time in question, they have often paid dearly for their learning, and missed the hoped-for reconciliation with humanity.
Serge Tisseron : how to help adolescents not to be duped by images
The tendency to believe in images is fundamental to psychical life. However, images – especially violent ones – can suggest models, but are by themselves unable to impose the desire to correspond to them. They are most often sought for their power of figuring, as much in the domain of body states and archaic imagery as of day-to-day emotions that are sometimes difficult to represent.
Adolescents spontaneously use three complementary means of managing the malaise provoked in them by violent images : language, interior representations and corporal representations. These three means are the key to education with images.
Alberto Eiguer : why don’t adolescents like family parties?
In order to find out the reasons for this refusal, the author examines the limits of the concept of manic defense, the characteristics of all family parties (a ritual evoking family origins and the belonging of family members, but which also brooks any excess or overflow), the singular nature of adolescent partying (hyperactivity and plugging into archaic sensations), in order to pinpoint what makes them clash. Adolescents don’t like family parties because they are the vehicle for a genealogical order in which they imagine they have no place. This would explain why they can’t stand the apologetic tone of such parties or the certainties supposedly derived from the mythical allegories expressed in them. This rejection is in agreement with their aim to build a neo-filiation for themselves, which leads them towards other groups and other parties (rave parties); but this is only the visible face of another quest, whose object is a place for themselves in the genealogy.
Claire Maurice : adolescence in the poor suburbs : a new “ malaise ” ?
Many young people from the poor suburbs are going through many problems, both familial and social, which raise the question of a new form of adolescent malaise in our contemporary society. These young people are not always open to therapeutic work. This raises many specific questions about the necessity of inventing treatment arrangements halfway between the social and the therapeutic, a way of meeting these young people at the space-time frontier that defines them: the suburb, this intermediary zone where minority demands and identity deficits converge.
Maria Fatima, Olivia Sudsbrack : project phoenix : collective effort at the protection of adolescents through the mobilization of family and institutional resources
At the request of a juvenile court judge from the Tribunal of Brasilia, the department of Social Psychology of the federal University as set up a project with two hundred youngsters the justice system and their families. Entitled “ Project Phoenix ”, this work aims to reinforce the capacities of families and adolescents to protect themselves against the violence and the hold of the favela, or slum. Exchanges within the group foster recognition of each person’s resources. This article written by Maria Fatima Olivia Sudsbrack, professor and initiator of this project, analyses the process itself through more than a year with these youngsters and their families. Through her first-person account and her analysis, she opens up some paths for French educators.
Teresa Cristina Carreteiro : brazilian youth, institutions and change in underprivelaged groups
Young Brazilians, living in troubled neighborhoods marked by the drug trade, experiment with violence and are often fascinated by it, even more so in that they are seeking recognition. To obtain this, they can not count on social service institutions, which have often tended to stigmatize them while the drug trade welcomes them. But some people know how to avoid this trap and overcome the conditions of their difficult living conditions. Thus Daniel, who with the author, elaborated his life story for several years, succeeded, thanks to support from differents sources and in spite of a life filled with obstacles and dangers in building his house, holding down a regular and legal job, helping to establish itself and changing his life by establishing other bonds of solidarity and conviviality.
Walter Ernesto de Marques : bandit friendship : youth, violence and masculinity
This article is based on research carried out with youths in a system of semi-liberty who benefit from socio-educative care at Belo-Horizonte in Brazil.
These adolescents live in a bellicose world where the warrior ethos dominates, associated with the idea that manhood has no affect, an imaginary and real construction of the modern world which alienates manhood into violence. The bandit has no friends, friendship being supposed to belong to the territory of the sacred.
The creations of privileged spaces, of dialogue, would help to deconstruct this violent ideal of manhood and its relations of domination so that friendship would not be banished from relationships between human beings.
Serge Lesourd : schreber’s children : the adolescent act in the time of the other’s vacuity
Using studies of Schreber as a starting point, the author highlights one particular part of the paranoiac relation with the Other and others : « the other wants something from me » which is the structural model of human relations in the current civilisation driven by liberalism. This paranoiac relationship with our fellow-men builds a manner of relating to the act which offers total realisation of enjoyment, restricted only by impotence. The subject then finds himself inscribed in a relation with fellow-men which is made of violence, faced with the hindrances that everyday life in society imposes on thrill-seeking. The human relations turn into violence against the persecutory fellow-men. Teenagers, more than anyone else, bear witness to this new kind of social bond.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 613-626.
Véronique le Goaziou, Laurent Mucchielli : contribution to the analysis of « violence of minors ». matters handled by the judge for children
This article gives the early findings of research on legal briefs carried out in one jurisdiction belonging to the Paris metropolitan area regarding violent infraction committed by minors. Using dossiers treated by judges for children, the author first proposes a typology of these instances of juvenile violence (« shady » violence, virile violence, neighbor-on-neighbor violence, intra-family violence), with the reminder that more than 80% of these involve people who are known to each other. Then the authors analyze some salient features of these minors’ profile and background: sex and age, family situation, place of residence and school history. In their conclusion, the authors explain that this research reveals instances of low-intensity violence occurring among people who know each other, for very diverse and very classic reasons in adolescence, as a result of conflicts that seem not to be new, but which are increasingly treated as legal issues (judicialized) in our society.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 415-429.