The film The Wave is inspired by a true story about a pedagogical project that is supposed to make students in a high school aware of the dangers of recreating a totalitarian movement. The evolution over several days of the Wave’s experiment, with its sometimes warlike outbursts, shows how the issues of a teacher’s very particular individual project intertwine with issues inherent to adolescence and with the force of group phenomena and their accompanying regressive consequences.
Starting from the clinical case of a high level sportive adolescent girl (in archery) not presenting any pathological structured organization, the author analyzes the processes through which the ego ideal is rehandled. Such processes are stressed through the analysis of the symptom of counter‑achievement and relation difficulties of the adolescent girl. The stress is put on the loss trial (symbolical castration) imposed by the rehandlings of the ego ideal : a giving up of childhood ego ideal and parental dependence going along with it. The castration anxiety thus shifted onto the sportive competition (to win/to lose) offers a metaphorical prop to the expression of the conflict and the material wherefrom one is compelled to deal with the psychical difficulty.
Starting from the clinical case of a high level sportive adolescent girl (in archery) not presenting any pathological structured organization, the author analyzes the processes through which the ego ideal is rehandled. Such processes are stressed through the analysis of the symptom of counter-achievement and relation difficulties of the adolescent girl. The stress is put on the loss trial (symbolical castration) imposed by the rehandlings of the ego ideal : a giving up of childhood ego ideal and parental dependence going along with it. The castration anxiety thus shifted onto the sportive competition (to win/to lose) offers a metaphorical prop to the expression of the conflict and the material wherefrom one is compelled to deal with the psychical difficulty.
Freud has left us a theory of fraternal rivalry from his self-analysis. For him, the fraternal is the paternal displaced. Conflicts born of fraternal rivalries are related to the Oedipus complex. Lacan has shown how jealousy between brothers and the conflicts of rivalry have as much to do with a mental identification as with a vital rivalry. The rival plays, in effect, the role of an identificatory image that allows the subject to be constituted. The question of narcissism, particularly the narcissism of small differences, appears as central. How do small differences call into question the ideal ego of the group and the ideal passed on from generation to generation? How can the origin be shared? These are the questions that this article proposes to examine in discussing the works of a number of authors, in particular those of Gilbert Diatkine and Daniel Sibony.
Transitivism is at the same time the mode of confusion between the self and the other that the child undergoes between three and four years of age, and the transition phase which is characteristic of this stage of psychological maturation. The difficulties encountered by adolescent sportsmen (table tennis players) testify to the reappearance of the phenomenon of transitivism in adolescence.
The author shows how this disturbance is significant of the psychological elaborations of « puberty » confronted with the specular image. The ego ideal, which regulates the identification with the other, is the instance that allows for the passage from the duel with oneself to the competition with the other.
In this work we offer a conceptualization that takes into account the theory of the mind, since adolescence may characterized as the age at which the subject formulates for himself a meta-theory of the mind : he invests his own thoughts with thoughts. The result of this meta-theory of the mind could be figured in the ego ideal, an instance which is known to emerge during adolescence.
Anxiety about guilt, as Freud showed in 1916, may be the origin of transgressive behaviors. The delinquent passage to the act, distinguished by its intrapsychical dynamic of resorting to the act, fits in with Freud’s hypothesis. Adolescence can give rise to a feeling of guilt engendered by parricidal fantasies, but also to the need for punishment as the symbolic equivalent to homosexual submission to the father, who can confer his masculinity upon the son.
Using two clinical cases showing how impossible de-idealization is in late adolescence, the article explores the specific nature of religious idealizations. It shows the intrinsic relation between the ideal, the need for the absolute and faith in a divine figure. The ensuing study of paths followed by three adolescents helps give an idea of an ambiguity intrinsic to the religious ideal.
From a reading of Freud, this article focuses on the notions of idealization, ideal formation and Ego Ideal. The post-Freudian distinction between Ego Ideal and ideal ego is made explicit. The article concludes by distinguishing between idealization and sublimation.
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 823-834.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7