While reference to destructiveness is essential to understanding the psychic dynamic inherent to the deployment of war, it should be associated with narcissistic issues at work in both the group and the individual. The choice of an enemy against whom one can unleash the violence of drives can be a solution for addressing the fragilization of the Ego in adolescence. So how do we participate clinically in the transformation of the warrior dynamic?
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 193-204.
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.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 182-192.
During the passage through adolescence, made up of paradoxes and internal conflicts, between autonomy and restriction, adolescents are subjected to pressures and violence exacerbated by a threatening social context. “War” symbolizes their quest to exist, which is marked by destructive behaviors, and reveals the anxiety and affective fragility of youngsters faced with a world where the absence of memory and of the transmission of ideals desensitize one towards to violence.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 87-101.
Why war? Psychoanalysis is no more ready to answer to this question than it was in Freud’s time. To what extent can we support the sinister Freidan hypothesis of a self-annihilating drive rooted deep within psychic life? Following the path of the “narcissism of small differences” and using the example of Russia’s war in Ukraine, this article will attempt to explore the question.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 13-20.
Since it offers a way of erotizing aggressiveness, war is a representation that can go so far as to be attractive in adolescence. Because it associates the pleasure of destructiveness with an exacerbated narcissistic demand, it can be a source of considerable sexual arousal. The therapist’s theoretical and clinical work aims to open up outlets other than the passage to the act for fantasies that are as murderous as they are self-destructive.
Adolescence, 2026, 44, 1, 9-12.
From 1939 through to 1945, adolescents, like the rest of the French population, suffered the effects of the war and the German occupation. The analysis of different stages of the conflict and their repercussions, allows light to be thrown onto the psychological reactions specific to young boys and girls. These reactions are perceptible in both daily life and in the school context.
What today, adolescents think of Politics? Being involved, how do they feel political violence? Do they link Politics and trauma ? Onwards a rather antropological general questioning, study and interpretation should go beyond phenomenological points of view as regard to sociological facts, so go back, in a psychoanalytical way, to the individual trauma as a psychic question, linked with history and contexts, generation and transmission, belongingness and fililation.
Can clinical psychoanalysis be useful in helping adolescent war victims ? What remains of the specificity of adolescence after serious trauma ? The author attempts to answer these questions by means of three clinical examples of adolescents whose psychical functioning was seriously compromised by traumatic experiences during the war in Bosnia.
This paper presents an intent of synthesis of the symposium and outlines its main results : interpretation of clinical data and critical discussion of post-traumatic disorders ; child soldiers’ psychology; added problem of exile ; reflexions on societal and social memories ; usual trend to the grief dimension; dynamics between individual and community, psychis and society. Il will be proponed to reverse the usual perspective, which implies a simultaneous partial redefinition of psychotherapist’s role, engaged citizen and social actor on the first lines of History.
First we have to specify in what way war changes the psychic life of young Subjects – most of them teenagers – then we shall have to insist on the difficulties they encounter in their social and professional reinsertion. These difficulties come out because of the reputation they have acquired for being « sorcerers ». We shall examine how this categorization, which is quickly expanding in the two Congos, crystallizes ; we shall also study the effects of this notion on these subjects’ disconnection from the usual logics of alliance and filiation.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°2, pp. 329-348.