Féminin, corps, adolescence : de la trace à la nomination

CFeminine, body, adolescence from traces to naming

• Auteur / Autrice : Anne Perret
• Direction : Paul-Laurent Assoun
• Type : Thèse de doctorat
• Discipline(s) : Psychanalyse et psychopathologie
• Date : Soutenance en 2011
• Etablissement(s) : Paris 7

Mots clés

Mots clés contrôlés

Critique et interprétation

Lacan, Jacques (1901-1981)

Phallus (psychanalyse)

Adolescents -- Psychopathologie

Fétichisme (sexualité)

Féminité

Résumé

C'est autour des notions de féminin, de corps et d'adolescence que ce travail s'est organisé pour interroger les voies de symbolisation à l'œuvre dans les atteintes que les adolescentes portent à leur corps (anorexie, boulimie, absorption médicamenteuse et toxique, scarifications itératives et compulsives). Nous avons rendu compte de la clinique quotidienne d'adolescentes reçues aux urgences d'un hôpital général de la grande couronne parisienne. La non-structuration des symptômes à cet âge de l'adolescence témoigne du registre d'acting-out dans lesquels ces signes du corps s'inscrivent. Elle serait le signe de la défaillance symbolique de la fonction phallique qui fait retour dans le réel du corps, en tant que demande adressée au père au nom d'un acte réel et non symbolique. Il s'agirait, en « repassant par le corps maternel », de tenter de symboliser ce qui, du réel maternel, est resté en impasse et de donner corps et consistance au père réalisant par là des modalités de « père-formance ». Marquer, démarquer, remarquer, pourraient traduire les différentes formes d'inscription de la fonction phallique dans ces marques ou dans ces traces. Nous avons rapproché ces modalités d'inscription du démenti de la castration et des interrogations actuelles en clinique sur la transformation de cette même fonction phallique dans le champ social. Ceci nous a conduit à questionner le rapport du féminin à la société contemporaine, notamment dans ses relations avec la perversion et la fétichisation, ce que Lacan a épingle comme discours d'« allure perverse ».

This work, which is organized around the notions of the feminine, of the body, and of adolescence, interrogates the ways of symbolizing at work in the attacks on their bodies carried out by female adolescents. We have reported on the day to day clinical observation of adolescent girls in the emergency rooms of a general hospital in the greater Parisian region. This clinical investigation traces a path in the body. It makes readable the trajectory of drives which goes from anorexia to boulimia via the taking of medications and toxic substances interrupted by reiterated and compulsive scarifications. The unstructured character of symptoms in this period of adolescence shows the dimension of acting-out in which these signs of the body inscribe themselves. This unstructured character of the symptoms is the sign of the symbolic failure of the phallic function which returns in the Real of the body, understood as a demand addressed to the father in the name of an act which is real rather than symbolic. We have sought to avoid an interpretation which would too quickly reduce the Real thus encountered to an aspect of the death drive in order to try to hear what might be said, that is, in order to trace the ways of symbolizing involved in these marks. That is why these corporeal signs have seemed to us not merely a manner of symbolizing those aspects of the maternal Real which had remained blocked but also to give body and substance to the father, a mode of performing and forming the father which we have detailed along these lines. We have proposed as our hypothesis that the girl was obliged to pass once again through the maternal body in order to constitute her own body as a place. This passage through the maternal body marks a necessary experimentation with the Real and indicates the Impossible encountered in the course of the transmission. The shaping of the father moves through the substantiality of the gaze which the presentation of the enactments on the body displays, but also through signs on the surface of the body. We have followed the path of these traces or marks to their potential function of naming. To mark, te mark off, to remark, could translate the different forms of inscription of the Other, the different forms of address, in which the cursor varies constantly between Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. We have thus interrogated what concerns the phallic function in these marks or in these traces. We have brought it into relation to the denial of castration. We have also brought it into relation with contemporary interrogations in clinical work on the transformation of this same phallic function in the field of the social. This has brought us to question the relation of the feminine to contemporary society, notably in its relations with perversion and fetishization, which Lacan has identified as discourses of a «perverse gait ».