Adolescent passivation seems to be finished now that young citizens are mobilized in defense of life on Earth. But rescuing the container is extremely costly for the developing subject if the adult does not provide him with reassurance. This can be seen in clinical work with some suicidal adolescents, who are able to reproach adults only through passages to the act, rather than through words or action.
Adolescence, 2021, 39, 1, 15-30.
This paper explores the place of the experiences of adolescence through an historical and political reflection on the sense of community. Youths were always on the front lines of civilizations movements of insurrection and emancipation, although the disasters of the 20th century have left their mark on human achievements and have profoundly disturbed relations between plan and action and confidence in the future. The violence of the act is within us, even in the external forms we use to protect ourselves from it. Imagining how to approach adolescence and fit its manifestations into the more vast rhythms of the generations would require us to acknowledge the damage and the contradiction at the heart of our community and to take care, at every moment of human life, of the ongoing metamorphosis in which we are involved.
Adolescence, T. 31 n°1, pp. 119-129.
Starting from the realizing that prevention of Aids among adolescents and youths is important whereas the epidemics is of mediocre concern to that population, the author begins to ponder on the complexities of the social representations associating Aids and adolescence, starting from the idea that such categories result from a task of the social institutions. Hence developing a prevention discourse on Aids with those categories entails Aids to be thus integrated into a consensus discourse rather that speaking in terms of marginal categories (homosexuals, addicts, African migrants). When referring to both these categories, what is at stake are patterns of social functioning (the biographical institution in the case of adolescence, the territorial group for youth). Such a reading of the action of prevention shows the underlying political splitting, i.e. on the one hand, adolescence that should be protected from the risks run by Aids ; on the other hand, youth that should be protected from the risk run by society due to Aids.
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.
This paper presents the psychoanalysis of a fourteen year-old girl, who had experienced a lack of containing from early in her life. In the beginning of the analysis she was superficially verbal, but gradually she regressed and slept most of the time during the sessions. Sometimes she would suddenly wake up very scared and look at me as if I were a monster, but when she saw that it was me she would fall asleep again. This went on for over a year, and it was reported that she had fewer problems outside the session. Gradually she became more verbal, speaking with a soft voice, more in touch with her inner emotions.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°1, pp. 11-27.
In this article, we aim to resist representations of youth as effect or victim, by creating new potential supposed to both listen to the adolescent in his singularity as a subject and to analyze what he represents as a socio-political issue for society. This objective pre-supposes new exchanges and new cooperation not only between technician-participants, but within society as a whole.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 349-354.
When the author (M. Hatzfeld) speaks of the « wild vitality » that shoots up in the wake of youth, I think that it is the adolescent processes which make adolescence alive, pubertary sublimation wrongly interpreted as transgression by the social response. Creative freedom, if we conceive of it in this way, never comes alone.
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 673-676.
The objective of this working day with A. Ehrenberg Going is to go back to the theses of La Société du malaise (2010) in the field of adolescence and youth. The individual must not only rely on his personal capacities, in particular his competence, but also on « his subjectivity, his inwardness ». « Individual (“ liberated ”) subjectivity is at the forefront. »
We would suggest that the author’s methodology not refer exclusively to character disorders, as is usually done, but to adolescence as a set of processes of creation and a well-known high point in the process of narcissistic individuation. How does the duel, united movement of de-institutionalizing and psychologizing social relations cause adolescents to suffer, perhaps in an exemplary way, in their supposed normalness and in their contemporary pathologies ? How does this evolution change youths in return ?
Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n° 3, pp. 545-551.