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Jean Guillaumin is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, professor emeritus at the University Lumière of Lyon, as well as the author of several books and numerous articles. He is a remarkable thinker in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis and has a special interest in the ways in which clinical practice and metapsychology are interrelated. With his elegant style of writing and a genuine concern to communicate with the reader, Guillaumin is skilful at relating a variety of psychoanalytic concepts in a rigorous and original way. In particular, he has linked up the retroactive effect of trauma with psychic temporality, the vicissitudes of the object with those of the negative in psychic reality, and the manifestations of transference and counter-transference with those of symbolisation in analytic treatment.
Within the dialectic specific to this author the present study, Adolescence et désenchantement, forms a counterpoint to an earlier study entitled ‘The archaeology of the father: between the anxiety of a presence and the metaphor of an absence, the “father of individual prehistory”’ (Guillaumin, 2001). While seeking to revise certain of his earlier works, which he succeeds here in enriching considerably, the author examines the vicissitudes involved in the intersection of two problematic themes specific to the adolescent. The first is the personal disenchantment linked to the process of the mourning of childhood; and the second is the social re-enchantment connected with an adherence to values, aims and collective dependencies—a movement aimed at avoiding depression. However, as post-industrial society no longer offers adolescents any system of support or fraternal or collective goals, the current ebb of social intervention leaves the adolescent to cope alone with his depression and the