This article offers an analysis of Billy Elliot exploring the this adolescent’s battle against a silence that has been hanging over his family since his mother’s death. This quest is guided by the expression of his desire to dance. Our argument relies on C. Metz’s theory of the imaginary signifier and examines the enacting of a confrontation between the real, the unconscious, and desire, revealing the ethical and tragic journey of Billy’s desire.
Adolescence, 2025, 43, 1, 127-140.
Through an analysis of the Pina Bausch’s show Kontakthof with adolescents over the age of fourteen, we explore the body, desire, castration, dream and identification in adolescence. We will see how a group can come together not on the basis of a protective ideal, but rather on the impetus of desire. This desire relates to dreaming and playing and manifests itself in dancing.
Adolescence, 2016, 34, 1, 167-176.
In the course of his career Michael Jackson became a planetary pop music icon. His journey and, above all, what he showed in his music videos enable us to bring out two central aspects illustrating the impasse of the elaboration of adolescent processes overlaying a failure of the integration of the genital body : the failure of the sex-differentiated encounter with an underlying phobia of women and the fetishization of the body through the choice of isolated organs as a way of preserving the omnipotent infantile body associated with the disavowal of castration.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 995-1004.