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Chair: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, French Psychoanalytical Association
Presenters: Christine Franckx, Belgian Psychoanalytical Society; Fernando Gṓmez, Argentine Psychoanalytic Association; Julie Augoyard, Paris Psychoanalytical Society
Discussant: Mary Brady, American Psychoanalytic Association
This panel considers the profound capacity of societal and environmental realities to threaten and interfere with the necessary identifications that allow adolescent transformation and evolving subjectivity. Following an introduction by Anzieu-Premmereur, Franckx examines the effects of the climate crisis on the emerging identity of the adolescent. She suggests that the process of mourning childhood and the loss of infantile omnipotence can be impeded by perilous realities. Franckx demonstrates that while the path towards self-differentiation requires increasing awareness of reality, threats to survival can derail the process and interfere with the containment that is necessary for psychological development.
Franckx focuses on the climate crisis and hypothesizes that catastrophic events can propel the adolescent towards an imbalance between drives and psychic defences, leading to regression and breakdown. Part of Franckx’s argumentation is that there is a breakdown in the function of groups in containing anxiety in the face of peril which creates a risk that the adolescent will not find sufficient containment to transform infantile omnipotence.
For the adolescent to make sense of the ordinary, expectable internal turmoil and to integrate this with the demands of external reality, Franckx suggests that the adolescent needs the freedom to explore and to revolt against authority as well as social and political ideals. These challenges against authority can also have importance for the collective and can lead to cultural, societal, and political changes. She argues that global warming presents a specific kind of challenge to the adolescent because there is no clear political structu