Anxiety in adolescents as an answer to the soundness of the Other

Abstract

The current text starts from the clinical experience with adolescents and tries to account for a clinical phenomenon found with some frequency in clearly non-psychotic adolescents, but in who there comes up a figure of the threatening Other, not enunciated and perhaps not enunciable, a mute, anonymous presence, which comes up in the dark, leaving him without resources. The central hypothesis is based on redoubling the fall of the symbolic function of the Other: on one hand, the adolescence, which characterizes itself by the distancing from the father; and on the other hand, the fall of the symbolic function characteristic of the time what leaves the contemporary subjects less protected from emergence of the real. Drawing consequences from the Freudian reference in Civilization and Its Discontents, it can be maintained more exactly that it is not really the Other what has generally fallen as an effect of the contemporary discourse, but the symbolic dimension, its love dimension, its pacifying face, leaving the subject at the mercy of its own ferocity.