Of the four middle schools and three high schools in France that bear the name of Françoise Dolto, one has just tragically stood out.
The circumstances of this tragedy, exceptional though they may be, should not lead us to make hasty generalizations. And yet, one thing is clear: murderous acts involving teenagers are on the increase throughout the world. This phenomenon, which is still widespread, should be seen as a weak signal, an early indication of a much deeper disorder.
And perhaps first of all this: if adolescence remains an enigma, violence is undeniably one of its permanent languages. We need to know how (and above all, dare) to listen to it, without of course excusing it, or giving up on punishing it when necessary. In any case, we must always seek to channel it into sensible speech or action.
Every time a tragedy of this kind occurs, an explanation resurfaces that has become almost a reflex: young people are sinking into barbarism, under the deleterious effect of social networks, video games saturated with violence, the permanent and depersonalized presence of death, an overly permissive society, the trivialization of weapons, the proliferation of drugs, the failure of families, or the exhaustion of teachers, helpless in the face of wandering youth. It’s easy to fall back on nostalgia for a bygone age, when such tragedies were unheard of.
Each of these causes contains a grain of truth. However, there is another, more essential and troubling interpretation that deserves our attention: that of an adolescent malaise that has been at the very heart of the psychic construction of each individual for millennia, and which Françoise Dolto was among the first to bring to light through her psychoanalytical reading of adolescence.
Psychoanalysis offers a singularly rich (and sometimes disturbing) reading of adolescent violence. It should be used to understand it, not to excuse it.
Where some see only a hormonal drift or a simple social symptom, psychoanalysts (first and foremost Freud, Lacan and Dolto) have perceived the emergence in everyone, for millennia, of a deep psychic conflict, a silent, unspeakable suffering, linked to three major sources:
- The difficulty of constituting oneself as a subject
- Rejection of parental figures
- Inability to express suffering
- Adolescence, as a difficulty in constituting oneself as a subject: this is the time when the body undergoes metamorphosis, when sexuality emerges, often brutally, and when internal reference points waver: the ego settles in; the superego (i.e., the authority of the Law) hesitates to take over. For some, this vacillation generates vertiginous anguish that is expelled by violence, like a discharge, accompanied by a disinhibition of prohibitions, a loss of reference points, particularly with regard to death; sometimes, it explodes outwards: provocation, aggression, murderous acts, with indifference to death. In others, it turns against the subject, in the form of mutilation, eating disorders, risk-taking behavior, depression or even suicide.
- Adolescence as a break with parental identification. In order to exist, adolescents must break with the image their parents project onto them. This necessary break may take the form of rejection, rebellion or overt hostility, long repressed in patriarchal societies. For Dolto, every destructive act of the adolescent is a message addressed to the other. “The adolescent speaks with his body when words are no longer enough,” she wrote. And when he screams, hits or withdraws into opaque silence, it’s often to cry out: “Let me be born to myself. Don’t talk to me like a child. See who I’m becoming. Adolescence is, in her words, a “second birth”, a symbolic separation from parental figures, sometimes violent, always necessary. Violence then becomes a rite of passage, an act of liberation, a cry for deliverance. Here again, the aim is to explain, not forgive. And it’s not about going back to the previous repression of vocations.
- Adolescence as the impossibility of expressing suffering: Adolescents sometimes carry within them an ancestral pain, a silent family trauma, a revolt against a society they perceive as absurd, without a future, devoid of meaning. In a world where adults seem to have renounced any real authority, where language is parasitized by digital din, where landmarks vanish into instantaneity and virtuality, and where the horizon seems blocked, with no convincing path imposed, violence becomes a desperate attempt to anchor existentiality. It’s impossible to overstate the damage that AI and virtuality can do to developing personalities, or the damage caused by the feeling that the world is on a suicide course, as reflected in any sensible ecological analysis. It’s not teenagers who are barbaric by nature. In a way, following Dolto’s thinking, it’s the world we’ve bequeathed them that has become so, leaving some of them with no other language in which to express it.
Teenage violence, when not repressed by society, becomes a way of regulating anguish, a way of saying: “It’s better to hit than to disappear”.
All in all, for Dolto and her heirs, adolescent violence is not, in modern society where its ancestral repression is no longer possible, a pathology to be eradicated, but a passage, sometimes terrible, a call to existence, a word without language. Please note: once again, these explanations should help us understand, not excuse. Even if, all too often, these works, particularly those of Françoise Dolto, have been used with a guilty indulgence towards those who had committed faults, even crimes, whom psychoanalysis wrongly designated as victims rather than culprits.
From this perspective, therapeutic work cannot be reduced to consoling victims, repressing violence or understanding perpetrators. It must offer every adolescent a symbolic space for expression, a possible transformation. It must enable them to express themselves in words, in creation, in action, in becoming an enlightened self, in commitment.
This work is not just the responsibility of mental health professionals: it involves the family, teachers and all the adults who cross the young person’s path. And, more generally, political society. It is up to them to set limits without humiliating the adolescent, to be authoritative without authoritarianism, to listen without complacency; to recognize his emerging singularity, to accompany him without subjecting him, to open up a path towards responsibility and citizenship, to help him understand the value of life, his own and that of others.
Along with many others, psychologists and psychoanalysts are there to support teenagers, and to teach adults (led by parents) to listen, to set frameworks and prohibitions, to convey meaning; to help everyone find their place in the world. And to give this very world a direction, a meaning.
In my opinion, this is the message of this unbearable, odious, criminal act, which must be punished as well as listened to.