This article attempts a clinical reflection about the act of prostitution and the psychical stakes it puts into play. A review of the history of research hypotheses and important moments allows us to stress to what extent knowledge of the anamnesis and traumas is insufficient for understanding the destiny of prostitution. Listening to clinical cases led me to take into account the force of words that have the value of an injunction, such as the “ You’re just a prostitute ” or the “ I’m a prostitute ” constructed by the subject. It is within this context of sensitivity to words that the function of the “ fourth character ” was deployed, as a figure of the social female Other to whom the act of prostitution is addressed and what is at stake in it for the subject. In fact, and this is our working hypothesis, the erotology of some of the prostitute’s tricks would contribute to the construction of oneself through the auto-erotic experiences involving the bodily orifices and what psychoanalysis calls the little a object. What we describe of the “ symbolic trick ” suggests that love is not absent from such a process of subjectivation.
Archives par mot-clé : Subjectivation
Bernard Penot : Psychoanalytical Teamwork : Return to an Early Point in the Subjectivizing Process
Psychoanalytical teamwork is recommended in the treatment of the particular form of transference that routinely occurs in the institutional treatment of young patients suffering from psychotic disorders or from behavioral pathology (borderline cases). The degree of alienation is such that repetition will tend to be induced in the other – the therapist, in this case – due to the absence of constituted fantasy in certain sectors of the patient’s psyche. It is as if the restitution (Freud, 1937) and subjective appropriation of these elements by the patient necessitated a detour through the psychical space of the caregivers (which is very trying for them), obliging them first of all to elaborate these subjective elements among themselves.
Vincent Cornalba : The Moment and Désirance
The register of the moment directly poses the question of désirance and its influence in the process of subjectivation. Starting with the problem of the encounter in the libertine, the author offers an exposé of relational issues at the onset of the genital phase. The register of consensual defeat instigates the creation of an amorous, masochistic self on which the subjectal evolution will in part depend. The moment – through the effect of divestment it introduces into the encounter, but also through the effect of putting into perspective it gives rise to – gives potential to this operation which determines the genital subject.
Evelyne Gosse-Oudard : Leaving Adolescence, Ending Analysis
If the model of the infantile organization of the psychical economy is the paradigm for analytical treatment, might not the model of the end-of-adolescence process be the paradigm for the “ ending ” of the analysis ? The notion of drive for control, a constituent of the psychical apparatus, once it is differentiated from the relation of control, especially its mortifying, negative aspects, will be the basis for an exploration of the processes involved in the establishment of the subject’s narcissistic foundations and, by permitting him to free himself from an alienating relationship with the primordial object, a pre-condition for his subjectivation.
Raymond Cahn : subjectality and subjectivation
Starting with Freud’s originary distinction between subject of the ego and object of the ego, and thus between subjectal and objectal poles, subjectality is conceived of as the process that enables the emergence of a creative, autonomous self, shedding light, through their disturbances, on some essential aspects of the setting and of the counter-transference which determine the possibility or impossibility of genuine psychoanalytical work.
François Richard : Temporality, Psychosis, and Melancholy at Adolescence
In this article, the author shows how the concept of subjectivation grew out of clinical work on psychotic states in adolescence. These are related to a melancholic core that is sometimes difficult to discern beneath the drive conflicts of puberty. Using a clinical case of adolescent-onset psychosis, the problem of the fundamental relation between psychosis, temporality and melancholy is restated in a way that can account for “ borderline ”-looking symptomotologies, within a post-Freudian theoretical framework and with reference to certain contributions of Green and Racamier.
Stephan Wenger : Placing Psychotic Elements into the “World” of the Psychotic
Psychotic manifestations in adolescence can take on a defensive aspect when dealing with psychotic illness, a breakdown (Laufer, M. and M. E.). Fanny presented delusive and hallucinatory activity and her symptoms disappeared after two years of therapy. Psychotherapeutic technique must follow a common thread: the conviction that the delirious and the hallucinatory belong to the internal world of the patient and form part of her narrative about herself; the associative thread of the session makes it possible to suggest that the patient invite psychotic elements into her psychic space or world, thereby putting them into the “world,” which is an identity created by the psychotic person.
François Richard : The Work of Representation and the Psychotic Process
This paper supports the hypothesis that the process of subjectivation resorts to a firmness of personal or artistic style when the subject is threatened by psychotic attacks, especially during adolescence. Thought and representation are then seen to intensify in the subject, but it is difficult to distinguish between the excess of melancholic consciousness, psychotic anxiety, and a type of sublimation that is fascinated by drive chaos. The paper proposes a second hypothesis regarding, inversely, the usefulness of a kind of solitude and of masochistic compromise with object and reality. A moment of psychotic crisis in an adolescent girl with a neurotic problem is presented in terms of how the quest for the distinctiveness of style curbs her breakdown. The paper then analyzes the theatrical work of the playwright S. Kane in detail; indeed, here we find an example of the paradox of a suicide that follows successful representational mastery. Finally, we discuss Freud’s ideas about masochistic destructiveness and Winnicott’s ideas about the core of the true self as being non-communication.
Ingrid Piesen : techno ritual
The techno movement represents a « counter-cultural » musical trend around which youths gather when setting up « re-creative » festive spaces. This article proposes to demonstrate the paradoxical character of the rave party phenomenon which, though it runs the risk of chronicizing borderline-case experiences, seems sometimes to open the way for a process of subjectivation, through the regression incited by group bonding and the rituals that organize it (musical tradition, drug use, integration of specific codes.)
Jacques Arènes : party and religion : a space for subjectivation
The party was born in the environment of religion, but the religious feast has evolved in its content and aims. The « we » is giving way to the boosting of narcissism and the search for subjectivation. Some aspects of the religious feast are today invested as spaces for conversion and self-transformation. In every case the subject will adhere to the religious « we » intermittently, in moments of fused capillarity, which may be renewed over time, but will not necessarily join a church. The festive will be both the moment for encountering God and the imagined scene of confrontation with one’s own destiny.