Différencier mieux passion et amour à partir des deux formats du pictogramme pubertaire (emprise infantile et élaboration pubertaire). La passion se caractériserait comme un double jeu d’abus de pouvoir phallique au détriment du sexuel nouveau et derechef, un « breakdown ». L’amour est un moment privilégié de l’intersubjectalisation nécessaire à la créativité adolescente. Aux limites entre ces deux états, la passion peut être amoureuse, l’amour devenir passionnel. Deux exemples cliniques sont empruntés aux romans hongrois de Sándor Márai.
À partir de la clinique d’une adolescente reçue en consultation pour symptômes hallucinatoires, nous proposons une lecture de ses expressions subjectives selon une perspective temporelle. Nous axerons notre réflexion sur l’actualisation de liens primaires où la sensorialité peut devenir une voie de conquête vers la subjectivation. De ce fait, nous interrogerons la place de l’environnement actuel de l’adolescente comme étayage dans ce travail.
Lors du suivi thérapeutique d’une jeune patiente anorexique, la présence entêtante de sensations de chaud et de froid est là pour lutter contre des angoisses de dépersonnalisation, mais aussi pour traduire la présence d’éprouvés pubertaires, infantiles et archaïques dans l’impossibilité d’être subjectivés. L’établissement d’affinités particulières entre les registres archaïque et pubertaire favorise de façon très régressive la domination des modes de représentance les plus primitifs au détriment de formes plus élaborées, ce que la psychothérapie a peu à peu différencié.
»Du Poil sous les roses (Fur under the roses) depicts over the course of a film the emergence of the pubertaire in a boy and a girl, from the initial vacillation of identity and desire, through the lability of psychical defences that they can then establish, until the resolution of their feeling of strangeness. Their path leads them toward each other at the end of the journey of sexual difference, that is of the affiliation with a sex, but also of the recognition of the desire of the Other, outside of the family environment. In this transition, the language of childhood is infiltrated by that of the adult; confusion gives way to an imperious work of translation. The gaze must arm itself with screens (camera, microscope) to filter desire in the world, the other and oneself.»
The pubertaire Virtual (with a capital “ V ”) would be a formulation of the Lacanian real, at the moment of the metamorphosis of puberty. The virtual conducts of adolescents could avoid it, with certain risks, while at the same time aiming for this deep aspiration. Distractions, they reflect an alienation through the image and its techniques, but one from which a work of subjectivation may nevertheless be expected. The false may prove helpful in the quest for what is true.
A clinical treatment of adolescent self-mutilation is possible as long as the adolescent is posited as being in a phenomenal crisis between two bodies. Not only between the child’s body and the adult body, but above all between the body of the partial drives and the phallicized body. The scene of the origins of the human body is psychically re-found and recreated at this moment. The author bets that a reading of the exchanges between Caillois and Bataille will give a glimpse of the adolescent tension in its subjectivation of the corporal.
The rearrangement of identifications in the young girl as she moves from the end of childhood into adolescence is illustrated using elements from a study of preadolescents and their future development, a study carried out by means of interviews and projective methods. While the prepubescent and pubescent girls had the same average age, there are radical differences in the mutation of envelope femininity into orifice femininity depending on whether the girls have begun to menstruate or not ; this confirms the validity of hypotheses about the pubertaire proposed by Philippe Gutton. At the same time, psychical movements of separation from parental images take shape, providing a springboard towards subjectivation.
The support of an Œdipal father appears to be a strongly present factor in the actual treatment of the adult and the adolescent. The author analyzes this relationship with the father as refusal of the pubertaire passage, which necessitates the bringing down of the father in order to make better use of him in one’s adult relations with enjoyment and pleasure. The present social bond which makes the father and his decline the center of the « transformation » of the world thus constructs an impasse for the subject in his passage towards adult life.
The experience of the pubertaire has a central place in the treatment of the adult. It is the trace out of which the dream and the psychical work of the adolescens develop. Affirming and confirming its innovative value in the revisiting of childhood sexuality inspires images in dreams in the wake of adolescent subjectivation. This point of view justifies interventions aimed at deconstructing infantile phallic theories whose rigidity is liable to stifle the pubertaire.
We have discussed the issues and limits the adolescent faces in managing his body through the use of an avatar in on-line games and communities. If the avatar may first appear very limited to us in the figuration of the real body, these limits finally seem to help the adolescent filter the pubertaire’s access to these virtual worlds, to make it into a place of narcissistic restoration, at the cost of drive activity that must other outlets in this universe.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 249-254.
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