In History of Private Life 4: From the French Revolution to the First World War (6), Michelle Perrot notes that Rousseau devotes the entire book IV of his Émile to adolescence, “this critical moment” that corresponds to sexual identity. “We are born, so to speak, twice: once for the species and once for sex (…). As the roar of the sea precedes the storm, this tempestuous evolution is announced by the murmur of nascent passions: a dull fermentation warns of the approach of danger ” (1).

Throughout the 19th century, this notion of a critical moment was taken up again. A zone of turbulence and contestation, adolescence constitutes a line of fractures and volcanic eruptions within families. For both the individual and society, the adolescent is a narcissist in search of himself, tending, according to Durkheim, to disintegrate it. If young people commit suicide more easily, it is indeed due to their poor integration into social solidarity. Furthermore, adolescents’ sexual desire leads them to violence, brutality and sadism, to the appreciation of rape and blood. Criminality in adolescence reveals its own pathology, such as hebephrenia, defined as a need to act that disregards all dangers and obstacles, leading to murder.

In History of Sexuality 1 (2), Michel Foucault points out, in the 19th century, the sex of high school students as a privileged object of this desire to know, which, in his view, characterizes modern society. Masturbation, homosexuality, the possible perversity of private friendships, these are some of the ghosts stirred up by doctors, and at the center of this anguish we find the adolescent with his bad habits, subject to distrust, distance and sedition. During this period, according to Foucault, a whole literature of precepts, opinions, medical observations, clinical cases, reform schemes and plans for ideal institutions proliferated.

In The Adolescent and the Psychoanalyst (7), Jean-Jacques Rassial constructs the psychoanalytic hypothesis that adolescence is marked by specific symptoms or by a modification of symptomatology whose investigation should focus on different fields. We know fundamentally that the reality of physiological puberty, that is, the basis of the concept of adolescence, frequently appears as an accident, illness, catastrophe, breakdown . The adolescent thus complains of being overwhelmed, of being overtaken by changes that affect him and also affect the external world, experiencing a temporal acceleration before which he finds himself disarmed.

In the Freudian text Three Essays on Sexuality(1905), adolescence is based on puberty, that is, on the encounter with the real of sex, and constitutes a crucial task of detachment from parents. Under the term puberty, Freud refers both to the bodily and psychological transformations that accompany them, to the sexual question par excellence, and to the contradiction between different generations.

“At the same time as the overcoming and rejection of these clearly incestuous fantasies, the most important psychological task, but also the most painful of the puberty period, takes place: detachment from parents. This detachment produces the contradiction, so important for cultural evolution, between the new generation and the old” (1).

In Mass Culture in the 20th Century: Neurosis (4), Edgar Morin observes that the adult man who imposes himself in historical societies suffers, in the contemporary world, competition, in moments of crisis, from the young man, from the boy. With the development of civilizations, the authority of the elderly is degraded. The great images of the mother as an enveloping authority and the father as an ordering authority, which reigned in religions and myths, are disappearing in the modern imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hamlet and Le Cid open a breach in the unconditional obedience to the father. Too preoccupied with his own problem, Hamlet hesitates to obey the avenging imperative of his murdered father, the implacable logic of family revenge. Modernity infiltrates this hesitation, that is, the failure to identify with the father.

“And, without a doubt, here too the obscurely experienced lack of a total mother explains the adolescent search for communion, a faith, a church or a clan. The decline of the image of the father and mother occurs to the benefit, on the one hand, of great paternal and maternal authorities, such as the nation, which is the father-state and mother-country, the Church, even the party, and on the other hand, as we shall see, of the models of mass culture” (4).

According to Morin, there is an intensification, in the adolescent sphere, of the contents and effects of mass culture. A moment of fundamental contradiction between the search for authenticity and social integration, the need for truth is imperative. The dominant models, no longer those of the family or school, disintegrate gerontocratic values, sharply devalue old age, promote youthful values, and assimilate part of adolescent experiences. Be beautiful, be loving, be young is their motto.

Immersed in the speed of contemporary culture, in fragmentation, in globalization, in cyberspace, in fast food , the human being of the 21st century has imprisoned himself in the need only to function, in the voids of non-existence. The new Hamlets and the new Narcissuses need to get to work, to perform well., to display oneself in public to defend oneself from the black hole of non-being. For psychoanalyst Renato Mezan, there are elements in current phenomena that did not exist before, producing effects that Freud could not even imagine. Some challenges of the 21st century (among which are the new pathological configurations such as depression associated with drugs, in addition to the recent forms of human relationships) are unprecedented facts and issues that challenge psychoanalysis.

In The Post-Organic Man, Body, Subjectivity and Digital Technologies (8), Paula Sibilia points out, in today’s society, the emergence of a radically new type of knowledge, based on an unprecedented desire for totality. Faustian, it aims to exercise total control over life, overcoming its biological limitations. It is the end of death from the perspective of immortality technologies, among which artificial intelligence in its aspiration to remove the mind from the human brain and transfer it to a computer, genetic engineering, cryogenics (body freezing technique), and antioxidant pharmacopoeia. Therefore, due to the technological advances of recent decades, the medical and legal boundaries between life and death are being reconsidered.

According to Sibilia, artificial intelligence expert Raymond Kurzwreil has no doubt that contemporary technological advances will be able to recreate sensations and feelings on computers, scanning the contents of the brain, downloading thoughts as software , and designing a computer that reproduces the structure of human brain neuron networks. Something similar is happening in behavioral genetics, in its frantic search for genes related to, for example, homosexuality, criminality, anxiety, and depression. Using statistics and probabilities processed by computers, this scientific discipline aims to establish exact correspondences between a given gene and a certain trait of subjectivity. After all, we are faced with a proliferation of discourses linked to a post-organic, post-biological, and post-human universe. Today the panorama has changed, that is, the mechanical order that inexorably governed the world according to Newtonian physical laws is in disrepute: man and life cry out for new foundations; the destiny of human beings is now written in their genes.

“Contemporary subjectivities and bodies are affected by the technologies of virtuality and immortality and by the new ways they inaugurate of understanding and experiencing space-time constraints; in the context of post-industrial capitalism, such mutations point to the redefinition of the human being, life and nature” (8).

Immersed, after all, in a world where images can be compared to bombs that convey invisible messages, we are faced today with the constant threat of becoming docile to consumption, to the fascination of merchandise. In the current moment of our culture, in which we are caught up in the logic of commodification, in which the visible covers up the fundamental enigma of the subject in the face of sex and death, it is necessary to create spaces for discussion where different areas can make their contributions, by privileging the subject in his problematic relationship with desire. The strength of the inaugural gesture of psychoanalysis consisted in placing the modern subject before an unconscious that, without depriving him of his freedom to think, determines him without his realizing it. Now, the importance of the Freudian legacy lies in the fact that, for Freud, the subject is implicated in the destiny that awaits him.

If the end of adolescence, for psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, includes the acceptance of mourning, first of all from parents, who will never understand us, psychoanalytic treatment in adolescence, according to Rassial, implies overcoming institutional, school, medical and/or family demands. Without following objective criteria, the end of the analysis of an adolescent subject should lead him to accept a certain solitude, which in human beings allows him to authorize himself in his life choices, in addition to maintaining a relationship with others less tied to imaginary ideals, ideals that multiply relentlessly today.