PsyaO, “ computer-assisted psychotherapy ”, is legitimized when the virtual game, by stimulating faulty insight, provides an imaginary dynamic graft that can awaken the numbed depressive or the child who is failing out of school … The parent can be reinserted via the ludic interactive relation that liberates vital energy through the pleasure shared with the therapist.
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Thomas Gaon : video games, the future of an illusion
The technology of the virtual produces an area of illusion that is more and more captivating and engaging for adolescents faced with a reality that is sometimes experienced with anxiety. Video games are the royal road into this parallel domain, particularly through its implications for creativity, sublimation and identity. They play out the fantasy in an interactive form that combines activity and passivity. In adolescence, the incarnation of the heroes of video games based on the infantile heroic identification in its narcissistic dimension (ideal ego) would help to compensate for the loss of parental objects. But, the positive and subjectivating contribution of virtual identity depends on the permeability of this ludic sphere. The richness of the exchange between internal and external realities within this transitional area hinges on the real and reflexive presence of the other, so that the circuit of instances in play can be operative.
Josette Sultan : the virtual image does not exist, construction of an imaginary world
The “ virtual ” image does not exist, any more than the worlds it is supposed to generate. The orthodoxy – and some“ learned ” voices – are doing their best to smudge the lines between the real, the imaginary and what belongs to visual representation. To what purpose ? Here, high school students, when asked about the notion of the “ virtual ” compare their experience with the creation of digital images with representations they are elaborating and with values circulation in the social imagination. A meditation on what has become a “ passion for ignorance ”.
Serge Tisseron : the virtual in adolescence, its mythologies, its fantasies, and its uses
The word “ virtual ” has at least three possible definitions : that which is potential and in the process of becoming, that which is present but not actualized at a given moment, and that which excludes the body and its turmoil. In all these cases, the virtual establishes itself as a fantasy wherein the desire to be contained in the image, to interact with it, and finally to swap skins with it are all mobilized at the same time. But sometimes, virtual encounters are also used by adolescents as transitional spaces for the purposes of personal symbolization.
Didier Drieu : self-mutilations, traumaphilia, and trans-generational issues in adolescence
If self-mutilation shows paradoxical strategies for silencing the excitation of puberty in adolescence, it also bears witness to the traumaphilia that operates within a context of narcissistic filiation. The case of Theo shows us how important it is to recognize the bonds of interdependence between the parents and the young adolescent faced with trans-generational issues. In fact, the problematic underlying these behaviors seems only to be able to elaborated after the traumatic tensions which are the basis of the lack of differentiation and the violence in intergenerational bonds have been put into perspective.
Christine Condamin-Pouvelle : the deadly heritage of the golden pavilion
The intrinsic content of the work the Golden Pavilion is analyzed from a psychoanalytical perspective. The correspondences between the novelist Mishima and the young hero Mizoguchi are only alluded to ; the author concentrates more on explaining why the young adolescent, received as a novice in the monastery of the « Golden Pavilion », comes to make the criminal decision to burn the famous temple. The vagaries of the construction of the ego in the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phases, and the hero’s difficulty in finding a place as a desiring subject are examined. The central question has to do with the peculiar status of the Golden Pavilion within the hero’s psychical economy : reality, fantasy, hallucination, or endo-psychical object ?
Gérard Bonnet : the trouvère, when the rivalry between doubles turns into an attack on one’s own body
The adolescent who turns against his own body is often imprisoned in a logic of doubles from which he tries to protect himself and which he tries to escape. This has the advantage of maintaining the illusion of omnipotence he experienced as a child, of projecting it onto the other with accompanying violence, and of stabilizing the latter by turning it back upon itself in a targeted, limited way. The mutilations that he inflicts on himself are thus real witnesses to the illusion that he needs to construct. What is interesting about a work like Verdi’s Le Trouvère is that it gives us access to the mythic scenario underlying this type of behavior and opens it up to analysis. In it we discover, notably, how self-mutilation is for some adolescents a rite of passage allowing them to confront a mythical double, to their detriment at first, but with the possibility of unmasking it later.
Olivier Douville : attacks against the body, or return to the gesture
A clinical treatment of adolescent self-mutilation is possible as long as the adolescent is posited as being in a phenomenal crisis between two bodies. Not only between the child’s body and the adult body, but above all between the body of the partial drives and the phallicized body. The scene of the origins of the human body is psychically re-found and recreated at this moment. The author bets that a reading of the exchanges between Caillois and Bataille will give a glimpse of the adolescent tension in its subjectivation of the corporal.
Jacques Maître : self-mutilation as a return of the religious ?
The object of this contribution is to locate in the history of Catholicism some elements whose echoes we hear when analyzing current adolescent self-mutilation in French society. In Antiquity, we find the martyr used as a model of asceticism; in the Middle Ages, we note the appearance of the Gothic Christ. The relation between old texts and current clinical data will be thrown into relief by a reading of messages about self-mutilation posted by youngsters on Internet forums.
The heritage of the Catholic past can be read in the practices of flagellation, illustrated by the mortifications of the flesh Marie of the Incarnation and her son Claude Martin inflicted on themselves in the XVIIth century. We also find the bodily inscription of stigmata of the Passion, and mystical anorexia ; the latter prefigures, within the framework of mystic Catholic virtuosity, the mental anorexia which is its secular version, and is now considered to be one of the major pathologies of adolescence. The link between adolescent self-mutilation and anorexia is well known to epidemiologists.
In the area of « post-modernity », scarifying practices are tied in a certain way with Medieval Catholicism through currents such as the « Ghotik », for example, when the singer Marilyn Manson uses Grüneweld’s painting of the Crucifixion as an emblem in a quasi-expressionistic way. The words of youngsters who engage in these practices show a wish to flee an uninhabitable world. However, it is necessary to distinguish clearly the different institutional settings where these adolescents live : family or group homes. In a penal setting, even adults scarify and burn themselves to « deal with » their existential distress.
Finally, this reflection leads to a question dear to the media : are we witnessing a « return of the religious » ? On the contrary, it is a radical decline in the control exercised over the French population by what was once the dominant « religiousness », that of the Catholic church. The dogma repeatedly asserted by the Magisterium is more and more lacking in credibility, which enables one to re-employ its scattered pieces without subscribing to its system of dogma, as we see in the current fashion of having a personal relationship with one’s « guardian angel ». It is the same with the satanism of young « goths »… Moreover, this does not lead to institutionalized ceremonies, but to private rituals that are a cry of suffering addressed to a heaven with a loving ear.
Philippe Givre : self-sabotage as a way of being an adolescent
Beyond being a mere psychopathological disorder, self-sabotage, according to Jeammet’s definition, reflects the maintenance of a dependence situation and translates a failure of the internal psychical processes to organize the relation. Thus, through this behavioral language or neo-language, the adolescent seeks to create a neo-identity capable of compensating for the deficit in the process of interiorization and, by the same token, to stamp out the narcissistic flaws that the adolescent processes have brought to light in their quest for sensations.
The auto-sadism which underlies self-sabotage, rests on a sort of « compensatory autoeroticism ». This is also an autoeroticism that has been petrified or perverted (as happens with addictions), into something purely mechanical and self-destructive, by fostering, among other things, the dis-objectalization of these conducts, which will then be edified as a way of being. A way of being that lets a taste for dereliction take the place of the desiring dynamic.