As psycho-sociologists intervening daily in the public space of low-income housing projects, we aim in this article to explore the diverse modes of socialization of youths living in these housing projects, and to retrace the major lines of historical evolution of groups of “ youths from the projects ”, often inscribed today in processes of marginalization. We emphasize the reinforcement of power struggles between institutions and illegal economic organizations within the public space of low-income housing, and the instrumental violence committed against adolescents.
On the basis of these analyses, we suggest the construction of a position inside in the housing project for educators and psychologists so that they may function as third party and social bond.
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Abdessalem Yahyaoui : it takes a village : giving sense to the network of parents and professionals
Through a brief linguistic and anthropological reading, the author isolates the structuring representations of the street. He then interrogates the vacuity of this street and formulates an hypothesis which articulates the emptiness of the street with the incapacity of the adolescent’s human environment. For him, the street’s explosions are the reflection of the adult’s incoherence and insufficiency. Through a clinical case, the author proposes framework for constructing a network in a troubled neighborhood. For the author, this methodology implicates clinical psychology and psychoanalysis in the social field.
Aboubacar Barry : african modernity and street children
In Black Africa, the present transformation in social structures and the deficit of cultural tools for symbolization and integration produce wasted family members condemned to err in the streets of major urban centers. These street children take the place of that which must be put at the outskirts of membership groups, in order that they may function as communities; they take the place of that which must be set aside for an interior to be able to constitute itself. It is as though the area of exclusion and transgression spreads within an inhabited area, in its thoroughfares, or at least what should be its thoroughfares, and its places of exchange.
Michèle Benhaim : the “ bus méthadone ”
The particularity of drug-addicted youth living in the street is that they are shut out of themselves. The “ methadone bus ” tries to create a meeting within a “ transitional ” space to the rhythm of a recovered temporality, in order to provide a outline for something like desire’s inscription in “ the Other ”.
Olivier Douville : “ move to the outskirts of the town ” or when time folds in upon space
The author focuses on articulations between urban space and psychical space. Using a clinical experience and research about adolescents wandering in two big African cities (Dakar and Bamako), he attempts a topological exploration of the subjective individual and group impact of places (suburban housing projects) and the speech life that is in play in them. This leads to considerations on graffiti and drug use.
Philippe Gutton : “ kicking over the traces ”
This issue of Adolescence actually serves as an occasion for a discreet renewal of thinking about the conditions in which adolescents and psychoanalysts encounter each other. The street is the signifier now chosen to reflect on the adjustment of settings to cultural developments. In addition, the street is not only a place where an opening of the familial enclosure happens: the theme of the treatment. It is also a space-time of subjectivation “ among peers ”, governed by “ peer group law ”.
Claire Maurice : intellectual handicap and adolescence
The clinical treatment of adolescents who display serious intellectual deficiencies raises a number of questions concerning the possibilities of the work of adolescence within its double trajectory of access to genital sexuality and new temporal order, insofar as access to symbolization seems to be “ barred ” by lasting instrumental inadequacies which hinder overall development. Most often reduced to the space of the small child, the space-time of the mentally deficient youth does remain marked by very archaic modes of psychical functioning which tend to freeze all temporal unfolding and all otherness. Nevertheless, pubescent sexuality is not absent; but its elaboration follows paths that are skewed in relation to the usual paradigm of the neurotic theater. Contributions from theorization about childhood autism and recent work on the psychosomatic offer a field of research on the heterogeneity of symbolic modes that on encounters in certain forms of deficiency pathology, and opens up the impasse of mere deficiency to the complexity of these types of organization, particularly at the time of adolescence when the investment of the body in its drive and sensory dimension is at the forefront of the time of the other.
Dolorès Albarracin-Manzi : somatizing virginity: actual neuroses and post-adolescence
Hypochondriac somatization means that the adolescent psychological readjustment is stopped. Some clinical cases reveal how the actual neurosis stops genital sexuality and re-launches an archaic bisexual fusion fantasy, which is the expression of the quality of the maternal relationship. This fusion fantasy is reassuring but also persecuting, because it hinders the choice of sexual identity in adolescence.
Myriam Boubli : the protective body of the soma in adolescence
If it is not possible for an adolescent to defend himself at the level of his ego by tolerating depression and if the ways of motor behavior are not open, the only thing left for the adolescent is the path of somatic unbinding which is a sign of experiences of de-subjectivation due to the intrusion of drive excitations into an immature ego. This is what happens with adolescents who are too well-behaved, too conformist, in whom the passage to the act is inhibited.
Colette Lhomme-Rigaud : crypts in bulimia : in search of the lost bond
Through the case of a bulimic patient, the author aims to pinpoint the presence of crypts, in both the maternal and the paternal lines. Recourse to an external fetishistic object was necessary to prevent narcissistic drift : already sketched out in the early stages of infancy, it was provoked by the mediocrity of the establishment of the object bond.