Aids is inscribed as a return of death within sexuality after the dazzling blaze of total enjoyment in the years of » sexual liberation « . It stresses the passage to adolescent genital sexuality of a hue which is quite different and yet quite similar to Freud’s cases of adolescents and Dora’s in particular. Such a return of death within the genital sexual accounts for the new sexual behaviours of adolescents (faithfulness, baby-couples, collective rapes) but also comes to be part and parcel of every adult cure, since the relationship towards the adult and towards love are now different, turning Aids into a real object of fantasy.
The treatment of an adolescent patient who recalled having been sexually abused in childhood by her father is described. In the course of treatment, various doubts were raised in the analyst’s mind about the truth of this memory.
As the analysis progressed, the analyst felt that the patient’s responses to interpretations were signs of the presence of a delusional structure. When the patient felt that the analyst doubted her memory, or was not on her side, she angrily and vengefully broke off her treatment. She remains a very vulnerable young woman.
The delusional structure contained the patient’s sexual need to destroy the male’s potency as a defense against her longing for the oedipal mother who, in reality, had left the patient for a new husband.
Adolescence is part of a specific approach of time which upheavals the ontogenetic development of the being. In that sense, it becomes a morphogenetical catastrophe that has to be assimilated by the subject. Being a fundamentally structuring stage of development on the psychological level, it takes into account former experiences and points of breaking up. However, pain does not systematically mean breakdown or crisis though it normally partakes to a morbid interpretation.
The preliminary and early encounter with the sexual in the framework of a sexual assault having taken place during the latency period alters the traditional unfolding of the psychological balance. On the social level, such a preliminary emotional experience entails a specific perception of a catastrophic nature and most of the times does it inscribe the experience within a destructive vision, i.e. altering the totality of the elements that are part of the subject’s psychological stability. However, the taking over of this experience of the sexual as a life experience were not to be understood as an involution process or as a damming of the psychological evolution but were to be understood in terms of a stage that would have to be taken an account of in the successive unfolding of the catastrophes inscribed within human ontogenesis, thus connotating more specifically the stage of adolescence, itself being a specific time within the revelation of the sexual attempt. The latter would then become a moment of personalization by the subject of what is to him specifically an intimate catastrophe.
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.
The problematics of parental narcissistic objects who escape is illustrated in the observation of a young adolescent girl confronted to Aids and to her parents’ death.
Most questions asked by HIV positive adolescents belonging to our speech-group deal with the secret around the contaminations.
Such a secret entail splittings and denials which, at first, protect the adolescent and the rest of the family. Then, however, it rapidly turns into an attractor which swallows the emotional cathexes, which structures a post towards which the resistances of the discourse converge and which cristallizes the defence mechanism system into an organizing figure of both repetition and homeostasis.
The disavowal mechanisms of its transmission have been studied a great deal on the transgenerational level. Groups and family work however compell us to be more careful about new mechanisms, namely the processes and psychological mechanisms at work in the intergenerational dynamics.
The surge of HIV in the paediatric field shattered the life and future of families. It followed a reverse path with reference to the progress that could have been made in the approach of the consequences of separations, death and illnesses of any one relative, parent or child. It forced us to have new conceptions about life such as : the desire of a child, giving birth and life, bringing up, protecting, guiding, keeping alive, helping to live and helping to die. The mother, one of the children, sometimes the father, all wage a merciless war against the illness, against discrimination, isolation, the secret, pain, fear of death. Confronted to such an earthquake, the author questioned herself on what those infected children may or may not feel at adolescence. Through these clinical vignettes and what children say about themselves, the author tries to show what a tragical ordeal they are confronted to. How do they survive to such a slaughter ? How do they or don’t they achieve theyr task of mourning ? What memories do they keep or are they allowed to keep about their fathers, and/or their mothers ? What kind of personal history will they build therefrom ? What kind of guilt is their stake ? So many questions for which sometimes there are no specific answers ? The recent progress in the therapeutic field brought changes that are both synonyms of hope and of pain.
The example of the story of Wahram Altounian, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian genocide at the age of fourteen, shows how an adolescent can undertake what the authors calls an “ adolescence-work ” as a particular form of “ Kulturarbeit ” by the original means of a strategy : a ruse. The massive mobilization of libido for self-preservation, buttressed by paternal identification and a quality of perception that quickly identifies the usefulness of external reality for survival, enables the adolescent to get what Kestemberg calls the “ Oedipal organizer ” going again. However, a traumatic part remains embedded within; it has not attained symbolization and retains a potential for melancholy.
From 1939 through to 1945, adolescents, like the rest of the French population, suffered the effects of the war and the German occupation. The analysis of different stages of the conflict and their repercussions, allows light to be thrown onto the psychological reactions specific to young boys and girls. These reactions are perceptible in both daily life and in the school context.
The change in the nature of armed conflicts has had serious repercussions on the situation of children and youths. Since the second half of the 20th c. humanitarian principles of international law have protected both civilian children, in the case of conflicts, as well as children participating in the hostilities. Today an increase in the number of authorities as well as in the facilities providing protection can be noted. Furthermore, the adoption in May of 2000 of a further protocol to the Convention on children’s rights of November 20, 1989 can also be considered as a significant advancement, as can the links between the protection of children and the future International Criminal Court
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