Is the friend a “ same”, a “ model ”, a “ figure of same-sexed investment ” ? These questions are reviewed using two clinical accounts and several propositions. First of all, the Friend occurs within a potential space, a “ between –two ” and is not to be confused with the subject. Then, it appears clinically (case of Sabrina) that the Friend is often the condition of the subject’s encounter with an object of love and eroticisation. Thus there is a triangulation complex implying : Subject, Friend, love object. A series of dialectical operations define their bonds according to a complex mode of resemblance/difference.
The Freudian model of Œdipal triangulation is mobilized, notably through family romance, to analyze the clinical account of Sophie. Desires that are incestuous insofar as fratricidal would have their place in the terms of romantic vaudeville between Subject, object, Friend… We conclude by suggesting that the juvenile period be considered as a amicable Œdipal romance, forged by investments in the Friend and the object. The concept of the coat of arms completes the dialectical process related to the Subject-Friend bond, thus becoming emblematic of what we call Friendship.
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Vincent Cornalba : living with
The author envisages the figure of the friend in its attracting role with regard to the register of depression in adolescence. At once caught up in a loss of objects and in the loss of a condition, which he must now subjectivate, the adolescent would find in the person of the friend that actor – facilitating agent, subject of experience and a support to projection and/or identification – able to sustain him effectively in this work which involves, in an essential way, the register of the encounter.
Philippe Jeammet : être adulte ou comment apprendre à gérer la place de l’infantile
La rapidité des changements sociaux actuels nous obligent à nous interroger sur ce qui fonde l’entrée dans la vie adulte. Etre adulte apparaît davantage comme une modalité de fonctionnement psychique, sujette à des fluctuations, que comme un état. Ce mode de fonctionnement ne réfère pas tant à un idéal absolu qu’aux potentialités d’un sujet donné dans un contexte donné. Il résiderait dans cette capacité du Moi d’accueillir et d’être en contact avec ce qui demeure en chacun d’infantile sans en être submergé et menacé.
Danièle Brun : friendship in adolescence : what for ?
What can we learn from those passionate adolescent friendships that unite couples of youths, their turmoil serving as a thread for stories of which they are the heroes ? In analysis, as in life, the friend is, in adolescence, the indispensable partner in the encounter that the other makes with sex and with the perspective of death. Thus it is inscribed within a treatment as an important figure of the transference.
Monique Schneider : between the object and the witness, the friend
Friendship is first conceived of as being situated at the origins of psychoanalysis. The bond forming being Freud and W. Fliess represents an anaclitic structure, permitting a overlapping between two dimensions of the human – life and mind – or between two disciplines applying themselves to the knowledge of one level of the real: biology and psychology. Sharing between these two realms is also found in the “ narcissisitic self-splitting ” studied by S. Ferenczi, which helps to understand the role played by trauma, whether in the birth of a friendship or in its breaking-off.
The analysis of the couple formed by Freud and E. Silberstein will show another structure: within it the friend becomes the confidant to whom is confided the confession of links formed outside the area of friendship. The confidant to whom these links – Freud then speaks of Gisela Fluss – are offered as so many sacrifices.
Philippe Givre : philia and adolescence
The central issue of this text is to see whether the thematic of Philia may be relevant in some way to the psychoanalytical approach. Psychoanalysis’ affinities with Eros do not argue in favour of this, unless we take into account conceptualizations of Winnicott, who links friendship with the notions of “ relation to the ego ” and the “ capacity for being alone ”. From this one gathers that the gift of friendship would be involved in the process of affective maturation, whose most elaborated phenomenon is the capacity for being alone in the presence of the other. The friend cannot be viewed as a mere model or as the equivalent of a self-portrait. Neither can he be reduced to another oneself, though he holds something that is due to me. If teenagers have a preference for friendship, it is because the gift of friendship is indispensable for them in the starting and accompanying the movements of subjectivation of the adolescens. In this sense, all friendship is contemporary with a subjective rearrangement since it conditions the possibility of emerging as what is proper to ourselves.
Jean-Yves le Fourn : “ l’amitié ” “ half-and-half ”, from Jonathan to JN. A. Rimbaud
The adolescent friendship is perhaps the way that guides the adolescent subject from his childhood to the adult world, through the register of the “ moitié ” “ half ”) – as in “ half-and-half ” : half Amitie, half Amour in French, half friendship, half love in English.
Two clinicals examples, Jonathan and JN. A. Rimbaud will guide us towards the possible concept of friendship in the adolescent psychoanalysis, which would be a libidinal relation but one whose sexual aim is sublimated by society into something like solidarity, justice, fidelity.
Pascal Mettens : l’infans ne serait-il plus ce qu’il était ? Une approche étymologique
En procédant à une analyse étymologique du terme infans issu de la pensée lacanienne, l’auteur montre en quoi la question de l’accession au langage, mise à l’avant-plan des préoccupations structuralistes, occulte celle de l’émergence au symbolique, entendu dans une perspective anthropologique plus large. Ainsi resituée, la résolution du complexe d’Œdipe n’apparaît chez l’enfant que comme le renoncement à une mauvaise fortune (cens) et la soumission à un règlement auxquels il ne peut qu’objecter parce qu’ils le privent de sa liberté ; par contre, l’Œdipe ne prendra socialement sens qu’après-coup à l’adolescence, dans une reviviscence qui ne sera pas abordée ici.
Brice Courty : sketch 3, on the virtual
We have discussed the issues and limits the adolescent faces in managing his body through the use of an avatar in on-line games and communities. If the avatar may first appear very limited to us in the figuration of the real body, these limits finally seem to help the adolescent filter the pubertaire’s access to these virtual worlds, to make it into a place of narcissistic restoration, at the cost of drive activity that must other outlets in this universe.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 249-254.
Jean-Jacques Rassial : de la structure au sinthôme
Le statut métapsychologique de l’adolescence comme concept psychanalytique prend sens avec la définition de l’opération adolescente, déjà développée par l’auteur dans ses travaux antérieurs.
Dès lors, la clinique témoigne de l’insuffisance, d’une part des conceptions classiques selon lesquelles l’adolescence se conçoit comme répétition des processus infantiles et dans lesquelles l’usage de la notion de symptôme pousse à la multiplication des profils de personnalité dans la classe nouvelle en psychopathologie des états limites, d’autre part de l’approche décrite dans la structure du nœud borroméen proposé par Lacan.
À l’appui de ses derniers travaux sur l’état limite conçu comme « état » et non comme structure, qui peut donc atteindre toute structure, et qui porte précisément sur la limite, l’auteur insiste sur la distinction entre conduites et symptômes à l’adolescence, propose de considérer l’adolescence comme moment de construction logique du sinthôme, et les états limites comme des états, provisoires ou figés, et particulièrement instables de ce sinthôme. Il termine ici par l’examen des qualités de ce sinthôme adolescent.