The adolescent is extremely sensitive to his encounter with the other, both highly invested and greatly feared. Using an encounter with an adolescent boy treated in a child and adolescent psychiatric ward, and through a reflection on methodological issues of a therapeutic setting, this article follows, step by step, the course of the clinical relationship.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 439-458.
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Laurent Carrive : the subject is a hero. but how to join the circle ?
This article tries to approach the adolescent issues of the act and its associated themes, loneliness and failure, through their psychoanalytic links with the structure of the myth of the hero. First, we will recall how Freud’s adoption of the myth of Oedipus is still a very cohesive epistemological contribution, one that still has much to teach us.
Then we will present the fundamental analogy that must be established between the circular structure of mythical causality and the oedipal process of subjectivation. Lastly, we will show that the reactivation of the Oedipus complex in adolescence reveals the deep structural link between Oedipus, the tragic hero, and modern science.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 429-438.
Solène Aubertin, Marion Haza : autistic, adolescent and virtual temporalities : where three worlds meet
The virtual is often criticized as a new addictive substance for adolescents. Here we will take the point of view according to which this tool fosters the elaboration of depressive capacity before their is a playing of the « I » (mise en je) in the real. Screen and body of the subject, the computer would be a first place of symbolization, on the way to genuine subjectivation. Leading to another space and another time, the virtual first allows one to approach in a different way the issue of temporality in its relation to loss. Since loss of the object engenders the « I », how might the virtual be another place where absence can be appropriated ? How can it help in the movement from intemporality to atemporality ? This idea will be illustrated by the case of an autistic youth as an archetype of the issue of loss and the passage from the imaginary to the real.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 417-427.
Julien Léon : dead father and imaginary father in the reappearance of the oedipus complex in an adolescent
In adolescence, the natural deposition of the imaginary father helps to rearrange Oedipal fixations and get beyond infantile sexuality. Here the author will try to show how difficult this is when the figure of the imaginary father corresponds with an idealized dead father. The therapy will then have to provide the adolescent with the possibility of elaborating the transference so that he can escape from the pervading presence of the imaginary father, a crucial step for the developing subject.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 409-416.
Nathalie de Kernier, Yuichiro Abe : heroic murder and hybrid identity in adolescence
The hero in adolescence appears regularly in clinical practice and in literature. The infans seems to be a necessary figuration of the adolescent’s hybrid identity, a necessary passage for getting free of its control. This breaking free implies a symbolic, and particularly heroic, murder. The passage to the act should be understood as a quest for the symbolization of this murder.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 393-407.
Vincent Cornalba : the valiant hacker. prince of the impossible
In this study, the author recalls the unshakeable link between the figure of the hero and the fate that awaits him. The adolescent, faced with this example of virtues that both provide structure and produce anxiety, may be l ask for anonymity while demanding to be called a hero. This is what the Anonymous movement, apart from its obvious objectives, seems to represent. It is a question of trying to dissociate the heroic act from the hero’s fate, the subject refusing to pay the exorbitant price of heroism that nevertheless feeds the search for subjectivation. The regime of the impossible serves as a backdrop and is thus the real question for the adolescent.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 377-391.
Tito Baldini : from hector to aeneas, by way of achilles
The analyst who accompanies the adolescent on his way to adulthood is identified in the transference with a sort of « Hector » and experiences his patient’s analytical process as a transfiguration of his being « Achilles » into his becoming Aeneas, the only hero who manages to make it to a satisfactory adulthood. Classical texts and mythological figures do provide supports and representations that are useful in working with adolescents, especially in helping the transference and counter-transference to develop.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 345-366.
Paola Carbone : heroes et adolescents. a matter of life and death
This article will try to answer two questions : who is « the hero » ? And what is the relationship between the heroic and adolescence ? In order to find heroes in their original essence, the author turns to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and notices some fundamental characteristics which show that, deep down, the mission of the hero and the mission of the adolescent are one in the same. The two poems organized around narrative dimensions of siege and voyage represent rather well the lines followed by the adolescent experience. The paper turns on four interlinking themes in two dialectical pairs : Prehistory and History, the One and the Double, The Circle and the Ellipse, Life and Death.
From this perspective, the myth of the hero may be seen as the means by which it is possible to attempt a secular confrontation with death, a confrontation which paradoxically represents one of the cardinal points of the adolescent process.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 345-366.
Gianluigi Monniello : constructions of the hero in adolescence
The author uses two significant definitions of the hero by L. Ariosto and B. Fioretti to describe first, the natural need to construct, in imagination, the figure of the hero as a possible contribution to adolescent psychical functioning and as an adequate imaginary reference point for creating oneself and one’s own ars vivendi. Then, in order to highlight how the encounter with the adolescent also implies that there is something in him that goes beyond the natural process of construction inherent to development and hero-playing in childhood, the author describes three possible co-existing forces that can lead to heroism, with very different results, and which are available to adolescents. The first impulse, which is reactive, is the impulse to continue bravely seeking and recovering the values of the past ; the second impulse, which is positive and differentiating, encourages the adolescent to detach himself from the worlds that produced him and from their internal and external influences ; the third, which is creative, is the one that makes him faithful to his original sensory experiences by pushing him, unconsciously, to « do what he can ».
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 327-344.
Gérard Bonnet : from tragic hero to ordinary hero
Homer favors two kinds of hero : the hero like Achilles in the Iliad, who glorifies mortal combat and has had many imitators throughout history, and the kind embodied by Ulysses in the Odyssey, in which the hero proves himself by thwarting the obstacles he meets on his way back to his place of origin. On the one hand, we have a struggle between two which, though it certainly brings notoriety, causes the destruction of one of the two parties involved ; on the other hand, we have the hero’s ceaseless combat to save his life and find his place in the city. The first gives precedence to the gaze and is submitted to the requirements of appearances ; the second, on the contrary, first goes after the eye which holds sway over him and takes it apart in order to give himself a name. The adolescent process takes part in theses two discourses at the same time, and presupposes a gradual disengagement from the mastery of sight which reflects back the ideal. Referring to different literary works, the author shows the conditions that make possible this evolution.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°2, pp. 313-326.