The context of the process of adolescence is paradox. The subject is confronted in a particularly intense way with the effects of dependence and the requirement of autonomy. This tension causes a resurgence of emotions that the subject must deal with, and the quest for sensation may be one way of coping. The reflective consciousness will be crucial in shielding the subject from the consequences of a destructive polarization.
Adolescence, 2014, 32, 4, 695-703.
According to wounding and frustrating emotional experiences they have met, adolescents at risk will leave behind the field of an object scene in which the haineous experience, warrant as it was of a bond with the object is still liable, in order to slide, regressively, towards the destruction of an object bond and a narcissistic decathexis. Part of the adolescent task is located within the slide hence taking place between the polarities of hate and destructiveness. Psychoanalytic care must be endeavoured in order to keep the liable rehandlings open.
Today’s delinquency, characterized by aggression against the other, the counterpart, which is often sudden, indeed, an immediate, destructive explosion, belongs to the archaic which has to do with the subjective existence of the subject. Judicial approaches offer forms of social re-education and prevention, focused on the transgressive, disorganizing act rather than on the potential for starting over, lead to the « confinement » of these problematic adolescents and young adults, reproducing a stigmatization of the troublemakers within prison walls.
In what turns out to be an impasse, « confinement » can carry out and induce the dynamic of a passage, by establishing frameworks for therapeutic mediation which involve the violent adolescent in a work of psychical re-elaboration and in a relaunching of his subjective dynamic. This opens the way to constructive and creative drive satisfactions which are not just a place of release for these adolescents. These transformative spaces can lead to symbolization and put these youths back into a network of intersubjectivity, a community of exchanges enabling them to turns towards a space of possibilities.
Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 797-813.