Analysis of sound in an adolescent boy who is prone to acoustic-verbal hallucinations leads a to a reflection on the condensation function of hallucination in adolescence, and resonates with the archaic and Oedipal registers, narcissistic and objectal issues, and, lastly, with the current outcome of these, which is between melancholic impasse and masochistic re-binding.
Adolescence, 2024, 42, 1, 115-127.
This article explores the place and role of the experience of sound in the process of adolescence. Through several clinical vignettes, we will deal with different ways sonic identity can be readjusted in adolescence and the consequences of these, for both the individual and the group. We will also show therapeutic work can be carried out when these readjustments cannot be dealt with psychically.
Adolescence, 2018, 36, 2, 319-331.
While emphasizing the way in which the band Nirvana managed to crystallize the malaise and latent fury of a generation of adolescents, the author focuses on the special influence exercised by the melancholy tones of Kurt Cobain’s voice. Though this white voice greatly contributed to the auto-affective and captivating power of the band’s melodies, it was not without the help of an imaginary companion, Boddah, who is supposed to have played a role in the artist’s tragic destiny.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 451-466.
Slam is a new poetic art form involving performance that has been taken up by young people. This poetry-performance responds to the need for narcissistic support and the conquest of new spaces in adolescence, when the field of language is invested as a breaking away from the mother tongue and the normative tongue. It enables young people to confront otherness by sublimating their aggressive drives through the common esthetic object they identify with and in which they exercise their creativity.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 4, 771-786.
The adolescent passage is paradoxical. On the one hand, the young person positions himself as a subject by and for the rupture with the domestic cultural universe ; on the other hand, he will often return to repressed cultural elements of the preceding generation in order to construct his future. This is a sharp and very visible paradox when we are dealing with contexts of migration, but it is inherent to every adolescent process, whether « migrant » or « native ». This article uses C. Lévi-Strauss’ notion of « mythopoetic language » to explore the translations of this paradox in adolescents’ particular way of modeling language and of speaking.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 101-110.
What is at work with rap is very typical of what is at work during the passage between childhood and adolescence, i.e. processes of alteration of both language and voice. Hence quite a few physiological and psychological transformations can be put at a distance, masked by linguistic and vocal games of the rap.
A text, like » juvenile poison « by the group Movez’ Lang may indeed seem as representing the verbal staging of a » change of skin » : everything takes place as if the rappers wanted to dismember a prosody, a narrative discourse, a self representation specific of childhood in order to impose rhythmically and metaphorically an over-dimensioned vocal representation, very widely covering the voice and speech specific to the subject both within its excesses and its willingly stereotyped characteristic.
Indeed it thus envelops and veils individual subjectivity within a both prudish and suggestive interplay.
Among the specific material collected at Fil Santé Jeunes, a hotline for adolescents, we find definitions of the word virtual and, most of all, the genital potential that is expressed directly in the calls. Invisibility and non-presence – another definition of the word virtual – are characteristic of the telephone. As a space in which parental substitutes are invisible and the adolescent himself is unseen, the phone line is an offering to representation, a particularly welcome one at an age when it is imperative that a representation be substituted for the bodily parental presence. The voice, the only corporal element of the telephone relationship, fosters a bond which may be regressive but which may also open the way for mutual subjectivation.
The question of the migraine as a body event in an adolescent is treated with reference to its articulation with the drive. We thus explore the shared elements of both pain and drive, with respect to their connection to the body. Furthermore, we discuss one of the analyst’s interventions during a session, as well as its clinical consequences on the subject’s relationship with the invocatory drive and with its object, the voice. The function of the voice and of its drive shaping as mediation between primitive parental authority and the constitution of the subject’s superego is also developed here. We mostly insist on the function of extraction of the voice object from the body, and we therefore refer to the Freudian concept of « the thing », as well as to the Lacanian object a, in its primary dimension concerning the drive. We thus emphasize the relationship between the drive and the little object a during adolescence.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 143-155.