In A Girl’s Story, A. Ernaux ends the fragmented story of her adolescence with the revelation that she was assaulted the first time she had sex. This event, the repetition and outcome of childhood traumas whose sexual origin is diluted by the author in the socius, triggers a phenomenon of passionate control laden with symptoms. Subjectivation through literary sublimation is both the subject matter and matrix of this work, and transforming the control into a cultural object that can be shared.
The interest of using the haiku form in a writing workshop for borderline adolescents in a psychiatric hospital will be studied through the writings of an adolescent girl. The rhythm and brevity required by the haiku leads the girl to fully inscribe the cry of a memory of an absence, to write what is still missing from spoken words. The omnipresence of line breaks in this type of poem and the splitting at work in the moment of writing will then enable the inscription of her psychic pain.
The specific case of teen literary writing is a rich medium for the identification of teenage readers. Teenage writers who have continued and broadened their writing gifts in adulthood provide a constructive identification based on a successful subjectivation of the puberty process, while those who wrote only during their teens arouse a strong fascination in young readers who are inclined to deny the reality of the puberty process. Sticking by such a writer or his writings can be the sign of an effective or possibly bad mental outcome of adolescent crisis. The case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Jean-Marie, who was very fond of Rimbaud’s life and poems, is a good example of this problematic issue.
The advent of Rimbaud as an author happens early, when he is just 17. He is caught in a dialectical argument about acknowledgement with Georges Izambard, the first reader of his poetry. Izambard recognizes its worth and serves as a go-between, without backing out from the encounter with Rimbaud, the suffering adolescent. He is a quiet witness to the turbulences of a teenager and the birth of a poet. Going over the dynamics of the weaving and unweaving of this relationship is of great interest for the study of teenagers.
This account of the institutional treatment of an adolescent boy, which essentially turned around his relationship with writing, aims to discuss the possibility of the establishment of a cultural work. The different movements that colored the relationship between this adolescent and his reader are described here, showing the passage from a bond with the object to its use in helping to make writing into a cultural object that can be shared.
Invited by his therapist to write as freely as possible, a fourteen year-old adolescent boy treated in a day hospital will tell a story filled with various representations of death. Dan will try to find a response to these, one that is salutary and most often made possible by the summoning up of different fictional characters. His story will finally conclude with a scene where death and symbol come together to finally attempt some structuring discovery.
Relations between the adolescent process and one’s relationship with language are played out through a certain « remodeling » of language, by way of adolescents’ graphic inventions and their new investment of written forms. In the invention of his signature we posit an essential act of rewriting of the adolescent by himself, in other words, the acquisition of a style. It is a question of investigating the changing status of the subject in relation to the signature joined to his proper name. This no doubt involves specifying the monstrative function of the signature and the effects of its displacements. We would suggest as a line of research a study of the signature-value of the marks of the subject in their actual formations: inscriptions on one’s own body.
This article shows that it is possible to evaluate in adults between seventy-six and eighty years of age the psychical effects of traumatic events experienced over sixty years ago. Here we present the constructive processes of an adolescent Jewish girl in France between 1940 and 1946. In addition to being robbed of her adolescence, the clinical situation shows psychopathological disorders linked to cumulative traumas : a thwarted adulthood, difficulty becoming a mother, troubled marital and maternal relations and a ponderous silence. Retirement permits the liberation she has been waiting for since 1945, in particular through group acknowledgement and the process of writing.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°3, pp. 601-612.
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