Jean-Luc Vannier, a Psychoanalyst, will regularly come to our columns to explain a behavior. He will also answer your questions.
During adolescence, young people undergo physical transformations that their psyche, still immersed in childhood, is unable to comprehend. Bodies take shape, hair systems develop, while initial emotions betray a reinvestment of impulses by the sexual dimension.
Although official figures estimate that 80% of teenagers are doing well, it still requires agreeing on what good health means. For adults facing the challenge of aging, it implies a body free of organic diseases. For teenagers, however, being “well in their head” is what’s most important. At their age, adolescents do not consider their bodies to be in danger. And for good reason. They have enough to deal with their bodies and to meet its new demands. The body, opening up to life, demands its due. Puberty, in this sense, constitutes a genuine cataclysm. Faced with these seemingly inexplicable changes, the youth embark on new quests for identity, from which parents are excluded. Sometimes unable to provide answers, these parents maintain a silence all the more embarrassing as this period often reminds them of their own traumatic experiences.
The violence of these changes, the adolescent will in some cases attempt to reclaim them. Through dangerous behaviors – those to exist at the risk of dying – which call for, as the famous psychoanalyst Winnicott indicated, “an environmental resistance.” Driving a car at high speed, contemplating or attempting suicide, consuming psychoactive substances such as medications before trying drugs, are experiments at the boundaries of human capacity which the adolescent does not fully grasp the danger of, for themselves and others, but which correspond to the experience of this transitional state. It is in this sense that teenagers “are scary.” This omnipotence that they seem to possess at will, this ignorance of death – all the more feigned as it comes with provocations, leaves parents in profound disarray.
However, teenagers still seek guidance, marks, and values. Psychoanalytic clinics frequently prove the youth’s interest in familial experience, provided that it is not delivered in a dogmatic manner. Told in the intimate mode of transmitting knowledge – a form of initiation, the experience of “the elders” resonates deeply with adolescents, even if they do not show it at the time. But psychic rearrangements in the form of an indirect reference in a later conversation, or under the guise of a joke not devoid of irony, prove the acquisition – the incorporation, as one would say in psychoanalysis – of the old stories from which the young will construct new ones.
Jean-Luc Vannier
Psychoanalyst – Nice
06 16 52 55 20
*You can ask questions to Jean-Luc Vannier. Send your questions to jlvannier@free.fr or redaction@nicepremium.fr. Jean-Luc Vannier will answer them in our columns.*
