Freud’s attempt to decipher the mysteries of sexuality, the unconscious, and the emergence of human desire through the enigmatic connection between body and mind was due to the challenge posed by hysterics on Freud’s couch. This is where the possibility of a new knowledge emerges: psychoanalysis. Hysteria, from the early days of medicine, a disease of the female genital tract, a contagious and epidemic illness, demonic possession, and witchcraft, acquired another status in psychoanalytic discourse.

In his article Hysteria, already in 1888, based entirely on physiological modifications of the nervous system, and even seeking its essence in a formula, Freud, however, shows us the impotence of technical refinements in anatomy in revealing such alterations.

“Another very important characteristic of hysterical disorders is that they in no way represent a copy of the anatomical conditions of the nervous system. It can be said that hysteria is as ignorant of the science concerning the structure of the nervous system as we are before we have grasped it. The symptoms resulting from organic affections, as we know, reflect the anatomy of the central organ and are the most reliable source of our knowledge about it. For this reason, we must discard the idea that some possible organic disease lies at the origin of hysteria”, Freud tells us.

Breuer and the cathartic method, the theory of trauma and abreaction; Charcot and the proof of hysterical truth through hypnosis (Salpêtrière school); Bernheim, Liébault and hypnotic suggestion applied to hysteria are some moments traversed and surpassed by Freud’s psychoanalysis. Furthermore, clinical experiences led, soon after the studies, to the increasing abandonment of the technique of deliberate suggestion and to the growing trust in the flow of free associations, which in turn influenced Freud’s analysis, dream interpretation and self-analysis, with its consequent discoveries of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. His patient Frau Emmy von N., a hysterical woman who had suffered for years from cephalalgia adolescentium since the time her period came on, made a great contribution to this, making it impossible for her to have any occupation and interfering with her education. In the illuminating report of the session of May 11, 1899, when Freud asked her again about the origin of her stuttering, Frau Emmy did not answer him at first, and then, when the question was insisted on, she told him violently and angrily that she did not know about it because she should not know. In fact, she wanted Freud to let her talk about what she did not know, about drive and desire. Emmy’s not-knowing, this “let me know what I don’t know” demanded by her, knowing, unconscious desire appears to us in Freud’s account of the following session:

“I also took the opportunity to ask her why she was suffering from gastric pains and where they came from (I believe that all her attacks of zoopsy – hallucinations with animals – are accompanied by gastric pains). Her answer, given reluctantly, was that she did not know. I asked her to remember by tomorrow. She then told me, in a tone of clear complaint, that I should not continue asking her where this or that came from, but that she should let me tell me what she had to tell me.”

Now, although Freud initially sought in science the foundations for his discoveries, the biological, physiological and chemical models will grope in a new, foreign area. Copying this knowledge is inefficient. We also know that what is called psychoanalysis will always signal the scientific and philosophical dimensions. In his biography of the discoverer of psychoanalysis, Jones states that Freud’s need for objective scientific facts revealed the immense fear of the dominance of speculative abstractions. According to his faithful disciple, Freud, in his youth, found himself strongly attracted to philosophical speculations, which he ruthlessly aborted through a strict adherence to the principles of science. Economic difficulties and the urgency of marriage led him to medicine, not a direct inclination. Despite having been a great clinician, Freud never felt comfortable in the profession. In the remarkable letter to Fliess, dated January 1, 1895, Freud acknowledges:

“I observe that, by the tortuous path of clinical medicine, you are reaching your first ideal of understanding human beings as a physiologist, just as I secretly cherish the hope of reaching, by this same path, my original goal of philosophy. For that was what I originally wanted, when it was still not at all clear to me why I was in the world.”

Philosophical distance and approximation, scientific inspiration and refusal, both science and philosophy are ambiguous foundations of psychoanalysis, against this new and future science.

According to Juranville, in Lacan and Philosophy, the analytical discourse, as that which has always brought problems to philosophy, is the very discourse of this final era. Philosophy and psychoanalysis confront and intertwine: without philosophy, psychoanalysis would slide into the imposture of action; without psychoanalysis, philosophy would be what it is without that which problematizes it. Therefore, by briefly articulating these two discourses, at the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis, our work proposal consists of distancing psychoanalytic knowledge from classical representation and philosophy in its Platonic metaphysical tradition. Considering what psychoanalysis takes to be puberty and adolescence, we believe we can facilitate and strengthen our objective. By referring to excess, to too much and to multiplicity, adolescence in psychoanalytic theory and practice does not point to psychic determinism, the predictability of the Oedipal drama and the negativization of repressed unconscious desire, reduced to classical representation, to intersubjectively communicated thought. On the contrary, adolescence in psychoanalysis is directed to the beyond of Oedipus, of intersubjectivity and castration; to the empty, non-metaphysical region, in which representation is suspended; and to the sphere of that which transcends the very possibility of representation. In order to achieve our aim, we will initially make a brief incursion into the philosophical field.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze comments that Plato was the first to announce and prepare what the latter considers the dogmatic and moralizing image of thought, that is, the world of representation. The loss, in Plato, of the founding dimension of chaos, fluctuations, shocks, turbulences and the greater chance in living thought, in permanent openness to new problematizations, marks, in the advent of philosophy, thinking as a natural exercise, a friendly, reassuring thought and affiliated with the truth. Nietzsche and Heidegger are philosophers who reinforce and criticize with emphasis what Deleuze indicates to us in Platonic metaphysics and in Platonism as an image of thought, in which thinking will then become anticipated and constant certainty of the represented that is immobilized, captured by reflection, self-knowledge of the one who knows. Therefore, metaphysics does not care about being as the imposition of the insurmountable real nor the dimension of the unspeakable, of silence, of the incompleteness of knowledge and of knowing to represent the real in the context of the world. The metaphysical conception of subjectivity/objectivity ignores that reality is something beyond what the discursive function can achieve at the level of knowledge. Now, when problematizing itself, thought finds within itself something that it cannot think, something unthinkable, something that, distinct from the ideal of knowledge, must be thought. Differentiating itself from representative knowledge that designates only the generality of the concept, the serene possession of a rule of solutions, learning mediates not knowing and knowing, an endless task in which the problem insists and persists. In this way, thought, forced to think about its central downfall, its natural powerlessness, is confused with the greatest power of flights, risks and hauntings. There is a headless person in thought, an amnesiac in memory and an aphasic in language, irreducible to the meshes of representation. Now, from the nerves to the soul, as Artaud and Deleuze remind us, the compulsion to think crosses all types of bifurcations. What matters is to transform logos into hieroglyphics, to give birth to what does not yet exist, to engender and think about thought. To think is to create.

“The act of thinking does not arise from a simple natural possibility; it is, on the contrary, the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking about thought itself. Now, this genesis implies something that violates thought, that takes it out of its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities.”

For now, we will focus on psychoanalytic discourse, and there, specifically on the field of adolescence, in his interesting work Totem and Taboo., we can observe, Freud reveals to us the dangerous power of contagion or infection that some people attribute to special individuals (priests, kings and newborns), to exceptional states (menstruation, puberty and birth) and to mysterious things (illness and death). Associated with something of the order of the special, the exceptional and the mysterious, puberty in this same text is covered by violent agitation. The storm of puberty radically intensifies sexual drives, ratifying the diphasic development of human sexuality as a determining factor in the origin of neuroses. In The Question of Lay Analysis , referring to the period of sexual latency, Freud tells us:

“In this period of life, after the first efflorescence of sexuality has faded, ego attitudes such as shame, repulsion and morality arise, which are destined to face the subsequent storm of puberty and to pave the way for the sexual desires that are awakening. This two-phase unfolding, as it is called, of sexual life has much to do with the genesis of neurotic diseases. It seems to occur only in human beings, and perhaps it is one of the determinants of the human privilege of becoming neurotic.”

The singular psychoanalytic elaboration of the period of puberty, of adolescence, affirms the strangeness of the drive, the impossibility of establishing sexual relations, and insistently fractures the failure of the subject as a discontinuity of the real. Adolescence shows us that, in every analytical experience, the drive is something that cannot be repressed, that pushes beyond repressions and that calls into question what is in the order of satisfaction. At the drive level, every satisfaction must be rectified; it is paradoxical, it brings into play the impossible that is not negative or the opposite of the possible, the real as the new, the shock, the obstacle to the pleasure principle. Satisfying the drive does not refer to a biological totalization of function, but always implies the return of the circuit, of the drive assembly. In the relationship between the drive and the real, we find what Lacan metaphorically calls the punctured subject, the headless subject, and subjectivation without a subject.

“The drive assembly is an assembly that, from the outset, presents itself as having neither head nor tail, in the sense in which one speaks of assembly in a surrealist collage.”

When treating adolescents at the outpatient clinic of the Center for Adolescent Health Studies (NESA) at the Pedro Ernesto University Hospital/Rio de Janeiro State University (HUPE/UERJ), what is inexorably reflected in their speeches is based on the problematic relationship of the subject with himself, with the object, and in the constitutive impasse of desire as such. Listening to these adolescents implies irreducibly defining an analysis as a field oriented toward what in experience is the core of the real, that something of the dimension of the traumatic, the unassimilable, and the ever-missing encounter never fully covered by discourse. Stumbling upon a limit, something unfinished, a bottomless depth that expands as it approaches it, psychoanalysis with adolescents always demands the new, constantly launching the discourse into overcoming itself, into the not-yet-thinkable about thought. The real beyond the masks in the adolescent subject is the greatest accomplice of the drive, a silent presence that engenders in psychoanalysis the need for a point of creation ex nihilo from which arises what is historical, significant in the drive. All knowledge is perspective, oblique and necessarily partial, always inserted in a certain polemical and strategic relationship in which man, and, singularly, the adolescent subject in his anguish, in his impasses, transitions and questions, is situated in a battlefield where he demarcates by an infinite plurality of interpretations the different emergencies of the real that flows like an incessant flow.

“What does analysis reveal if not the profound, radical discordance of man’s essential behaviors in relation to everything he experiences? The dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of something that progresses through adaptation, through approximation, through improvement. It is something that goes through discontinuities, through leaps.”

If truth was postulated as the supreme instance by Western philosophical reason that defined a legal link between thought and truth, and if the clear and irreversible separation of truth and falsehood is sustained by a subject that assumes that it rules the totality of discourse by its meaning, to break with Platonic Western metaphysical philosophy is to distort knowledge through logocentrism, similarity and unity. And so does the stormy adolescent in our clinic, in the incessant construction of his existence, by demolishing the consolation of recognitions, constancies and prior affinities between knowledge and the world. In turn, our analysts are left only to question, touch on this subject and direct the analysis in the sense of preserving the unspeakable. Analytical formation only comes through the testimony of not knowing that sustains the advent of the discourse of the other (place of truth, place of the unconscious) to which one cannot respond. Since it is not in the order of knowledge, an analysis does not end with the deciphering of the subject, in this case, of our adolescent subject, but with the enigma that endlessly forces us to think and leads us to speak, to open up and to produce.