Becoming an adult is a step in the process of subjectivation, insofar as it initiates a new encounter with external reality and causes a confrontation with many anxieties of abandonment and castration, which can take the form of school phobia. The author uses a reading of Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep, along with a clinical situation, to shed light on the nature and function of this symptom in the dynamic of post-adolescence.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 2, 257-268.
Through a clinical confrontation, the author shows how the listening is rough with the insistence of the purely descriptive account; and exactly when the dead end of the transference – counter transference is made of a sense of remorse. His analysis unfolds also a heuristics inspired by the language of their meeting and their primary language: Arabic. The latter by virtue of its specific structuration allows some words to assume the shape of metapsychological concepts, and at the same time to be a linguistic rest which open onto a lecture of trauma with an exit registred towards the working out of the letter.