Transgression et recours à l’acte à l’adolescence : une forme agie d’appel à l’objet

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The author, based upon personal writings and clinical observations, considers some delinquent acts of adolescents within a continuity of fantastical over-activity strengthening narcissistic ideals and desires of omnipotence. The minor unlawful acts undertaken to show a psychic situation of suffering appear under a double aspect: a trouble with limits, external as well as psychic, and a superego dysfunction, leading to masochism. On a conceptual plane, from a psychoanalytical point of view existing knowledge about the “problematic of the act” indicates that the terms “passage à l’acte” and “acting out” give no information about the specificity of this kind of symptom. The author thinks these characteristics of the act, helping the homeostasis of the ego via a third party require a new denomination: the “recourse to act”. The recourse to act, a Freudian expression, includes a specific act language concerning pregenital tendencies without physical violence. It designs all symptomatic acts, allowing later psychic elaboration, thus allowing a representation of this depressive transition inherent to the adolescent's process. This socialisation contributes to an experience which restores the difference between reality and imagination and tends to maintain the reality Principle; the adolescent in quest of object internalisation can then appropriate part of his internal conflicts. Thus, without resolving his personal and infantile problematic, the recourse to act produces an experience presenting a symbolic activity in the service of the adolescence process.