Using an account of the mother of a parricidal adolescent, we offer several hypotheses about the most salient aspects of unconscious motives for murder. The parent-child link that has been tainted by incestuality is a source of indifferentiation and confusion of oneself with objects, giving rise to a feeling of melanchogenic impersonalization, a source of violence. In this context, murder also appears as an attempt to “make an origin” within a troubled transgenerational context.
This article will analyze the expression of hatred of the father, which is as often encountered in treatment as it is in contemporary adolescents. Though it is true that the manifest content of an account may relate to different latent content and that the very conditions of adolescent treatments do not always enable the uncovering of the deepest levels of the unconscious, in the continuation of Freud’s work on the issue of parricide the study of literary works is a privileged way of understanding this affect.
A decisive step in the construction of the child, hate expresses a destructiveness that overcomes the initial resistance to autonomy. Freud illustrates this with the Fort-Da wherein the child exercises, then overcomes, his controlling drive. And D. W. Winnicott insists on the crucial role of the mother during this step in which hate is redirected against her. For Freud as for D. W. Winnicott, hate is at the origin of thought: without hate, there would be no separation, and no construction of the psyche-body.
Hate as a sign of pubertary pictogram disfunction, in which the childhood identifier is dissociated from the pubertary identified. An excess of infantile control is the source of this primal affect, which belongs to the psychopathological level of Lauferian breakdown.
Looking at several field studies in West Africa and Southeast Asia, this article will attempt to show the feelings of shame and hate which can be such a hindrance when the subject, excluded from social links by political and social violence, is asked to find a new foundation in the threads of a dialogue in which the logic of legitimacy, affiliation and kinship could be reconfigured.
After having briefly evoked Freudian theories of hate and the three positions that I have suggested for study in adolescents, a clinical observation will allow us to gauge the impact of pubertary transformations stemming from childhood experiences in patients afflicted with grave somatic illnesses. These pathologies are not the expression of specific psychic conflicts; such traumatic disorders mobilize the resources of mental functioning in order to confront them better.
The issue of hate and adolescence is viewed as a play of mirrors: on the one hand, there the hate that the adolescent can feel and which may be hatred of the other or self-hatred; on the other hand, the hate that may be directed at the adolescent, hatred of adolescents.
Hatred is profoundly narcissistic. It bespeaks an archaic defense, an extreme form of protection against the threat of narcissistic and psychic breakdown. It may be inoffensive or, on the contrary, aggressive and destructive, seeking to destroy otherness. In adolescence, the affective movement of hatred appears necessary with regard to the parental objects and towards the environment in general, since the adolescent has the feeling of being “frowned upon”, passivated or feminized.
Tout en soulignant comment le groupe Nirvana a réussi à cristalliser le mal-être et la fureur latente de toute une génération adolescente, l’auteur s’attarde sur l’influence très particulière jouée par les tonalités mélancoliques de la voix de Kurt Cobain. Si cette voix blanche a grandement contribué aux pouvoirs d’auto-affectation et de captation qui émanaient des mélodies musicales de ce groupe grunge, elle n’aura pas été sans lien avec la présence cachée d’un compagnon imaginaire, Boddah, lequel aura pris une part active dans la destinée fatale de l’artiste.
Nous avons choisi d’éclairer la problématique de la sexuation à l’adolescence à partir des processus pervers et plus particulièrement du masochisme. La mobilisation des processus pervers tentent de négocier des fantasmes de séduction, lesquels restent surchargés par des réalités traumatiques comme l’inceste et la mort. Nous nous proposons d’articuler perversion et sublimation versus idéalisation.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 439-448.
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