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.
Adolescence characterizes itself as taking place through a need of analisis onto exterior reality. In such a situation of social and psychological catastrophe as the Shoah was, the destruction of any exterior reality prevents the subjcet from any anaclisis, thus leaving him at grips with an exterior reality experienced as being destructive. In the abscence of mediating structures, such as the group of peers or school, the adolescent will use mechanisms as the suppression of affects or denial whose prolonged use will forever stamp his psycholigical future.
The « Maison de Solenn – Maison des Adolescents » offers a psychotherapy unit, allowing us to propose to some of them a psychoanalytical therapy. If some discuss the merits of a psychoanalytical work in adolescence, as the articulation of psychotherapeutic and analytical objectives, the arrangements led in the practice by certain specificities of adolescence, join the creative movement of evolution and diversification of the psychoanalytical practices. It is, however, up to the psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to formalize their practices in order to be able to describe them, subject them to the work of thought through the practice of supervision and internal theoretical and clinical exchanges, and to bring them into more general psychoanalytical debates to assure, by the understanding of the differences and the recognition of the common elements, the fertility of the psychoanalytical approach to adolescent suffering.