A clinical situation encountered in the context of the Youth Judicial Protection system will enable us to explore the issue of violent radicalization and the desire to fight in adolescence. Demands for destruction should be understood as a problem of fusion and separation with an archaic maternal figure. In this pubertary context of fragile narcissism and identity, the attraction of war would become a recourse against archaic annihilation anxieties.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 75-85.
Family wars are rooted in the ambivalence of affective links. Love and hate are not mutually exclusive: they cohabit within suffocating proximity. Marital conflicts, sibling rivalries, impossible expectations, all feed into tensions which, if they have no outlet, are transformed into lasting oppositions. To construct himself, the young person must oppose, sometimes violently. In this struggle for autonomy, the home becomes the theater of a true positional war.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 75-85.
This article describes the first stages of the treatment of a schizophrenic patient who is violently opposed to care. This violence is understood as the impossibility of investing the object, which endangers the patient’s own Ego. The therapeutic situation requires that the object be imposed on the patient, which leads to an erotomaniac-type relation. The end of war that has been imposed in this way takes different forms; what is at stake in the end is separation and loss.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 47-60.
Using the observation of Julien, who was “cured” of his depressive state through antidepressants, we will explore the psychic readjustments that follow this apparent “normalization”. We show that when depressive elaboration has been hindered, the adolescent process can be frozen. The disinhibition induced by the treatment exposes it to the violence of the drives and to the passage to the act. This freezing gives rise to paranoiac projects, a screen for a passive homosexual position that has not been elaborated.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 33-45.
How can a depressive problem become fixed in a depression that, with neglect, can itself be frozen into a more serious pathology? A treatment with anti-depressives, which was justified but not associated with a relational therapy, leads an adolescent who was well treated but received mediocre care into a problematic that appeared paranoiac. Two other cases recently reported in the press provide more evidence of this evolving risk within a social context where “adolescent malaise” is constantly evoked.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 21-32.
Why war? Psychoanalysis is no more ready to answer to this question than it was in Freud’s time. To what extent can we support the sinister Freidan hypothesis of a self-annihilating drive rooted deep within psychic life? Following the path of the “narcissism of small differences” and using the example of Russia’s war in Ukraine, this article will attempt to explore the question.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 13-20.
Since it offers a way of erotizing aggressiveness, war is a representation that can go so far as to be attractive in adolescence. Because it associates the pleasure of destructiveness with an exacerbated narcissistic demand, it can be a source of considerable sexual arousal. The therapist’s theoretical and clinical work aims to open up outlets other than the passage to the act for fantasies that are as murderous as they are self-destructive.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 9-12.