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Raymond Cahn's new book follows the paper ‘Du sujet’ [The subject] (1990) presented to the Congress of French-Language Psychoanalysts and his theoretico-clinical work Adolescence et folie—les déliaisons dangereuses (1991).2
The volume under review is divided into three long chapters: (I) the adolescent in psychoanalysis (psychopathology and metapsychology); (II) the adolescent and psychoanalytic treatment; and (III) adolescence, culture and society.
It is worth preceding our discussion of the book as a whole with a note on the author's definitions of adolescence and his conception of the process of becoming-a-subject.3 These vibrant notions recur frequently during the course of the book. In Cahn's view, ‘adolescence is the period when the coming together of biological, psychic and social factors completes the long path of development of the young of the human species from neonate to adulthood’ (p. 7). ‘However, the subject of psychoanalysis does not appear on the stage fully equipped with its definitive psychic apparatus.’ The subject is in fact the culmination of a long process, adolescence being the vital phase in which new modalities of psychic work are created. It is the critical period of every possibility. Here, ‘becoming-a-subject’ is defined as ‘a process that gradually establishes the distinct existence of subject and object, the necessary distance between self and self’ (p. 185). The author notes elsewhere that there can be ‘no subject without an object’, but that the interrelationship between the two is conditional upon disengagement and dealienation from the power of the other—from the object that is, all the same, essential to the subject's psychic life. Subjective appropriation begins at birth and continues until the ‘concluding phase’ that permits—or, as the case may be, does not permit—the establishment of a personal psychic space and ‘the possibility of an internal process of transformation and creation’ (p. 2). Cahn sees in these capacities ‘the cond