The psychopathology of violence in difficult adolescents
at the core of situations triggered early on
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60106/rsbppa.v15i1.484Keywords:
Adolescence, Bonding, Delinquency, Law, PsychopathologyAbstract
Adolescence is a period of psychic vulnerability in that it means a new phase in the long process of separation initiated at birth. By sexualizing the relationship with others, within the family, in a more or less conscious manner, puberty introduces adolescents to a new sort of separation from their child objects. Adolescence thus brings the issue of separation and bonding during this stage of development to the limelight. Having to solve the problems caused by this inevitable separation by themselves, adolescents are mainly faced up with everything that remains from their previous unsolved dependence upon the key characters in their family environment. They will use all their psychic resources to deal with this new separation phase. In practice, these resources are limited by the adolescent process itself, which leads adolescents to invest in acts and sensations, thereby avoiding mentalization and the psychic process, as much as they do with the feelings of dependence over which they seek to gain control. However, resorting to acts and sensations has a major purpose: by affecting the psyche of people in the surrounding environment, the adolescent makes these people share some of the problems externalized by his/her acts. The people living closest to the adolescent are then urged to use their imaginary capacity to make sense of these invasive affects induced by the adolescent’s acts; they therefore use their empathic capacity to metaphorize them (LEBOVICI, 1998), taking on, in a protective fashion, the psychic work the adolescent cannot accomplish, as the adolescent acts in order not to think. Very useful in the psychiatric context, this concept also applies to other contexts (educational, legal or pedagogical), regardless of the forms the adolescent’s acts take or how they are eventually labeled. The paper refers mainly to the forms of violence in adolescence (chiefly to delinquent behaviors) and to the guidelines that may be developed from the differences which result from this standpoint.
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