Starting from a case study, this paper addresses the complexity of simultaneously performing a « work of adolescence » and a « work of disease » for adolescents suffering from a serious somatic disease since childhood and being also under dialysis for a shorter amount of time. Being dependent on an artificial kidney, a nursing team, and his mother, the adolescent can hardly also grow as an adolescent. Dmitri is an adolescent who whose corporal changes have been thwarted by disease and death. During psychoanalytic work, he tries to elaborate this, starting with some video game experience. In video games, and hence, through another machine (the computer), he creates and then incarnates an avatar that lies between two universes, the real one, and a virtual one. From this state, he constructs a tale in which life and game fade into each other, where reality and the virtual world melt together in order to make the latter more bearable and also in order to make more bearable the idea that he is bound to live with a machine. This idea materializes by means of a game which he can both control and share, and which therefore serves as a transitional space
This article suggests three imaginary representations – exile, combat and masquerade – as illustrations of the unconscious forces that give rise to the digital behavior of adolescents.
The virtual is often criticized as a new addictive substance for adolescents. Here we will take the point of view according to which this tool fosters the elaboration of depressive capacity before their is a playing of the « I » (mise en je) in the real. Screen and body of the subject, the computer would be a first place of symbolization, on the way to genuine subjectivation. Leading to another space and another time, the virtual first allows one to approach in a different way the issue of temporality in its relation to loss. Since loss of the object engenders the « I », how might the virtual be another place where absence can be appropriated ? How can it help in the movement from intemporality to atemporality ? This idea will be illustrated by the case of an autistic youth as an archetype of the issue of loss and the passage from the imaginary to the real. Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 417-427.
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