Fanny Dargent, Corps scarifié et cruauté de l’expérience adolescente

Abstract: This article is available in French only. In the past decade, the spread of incision practices (skin perforation) in adolescents comes from a sociological and psychopathological reality. Based on the clinical experience gained in a hospitalization unit and in an ambulatory for adolescents, we propose reflecting upon the processes involved in this form of bodily injury. If the notion of cruelty is normally used to describe actions of various practices of voluntary skin incision/ perforation, the role played by the reminiscence of infantile cruelty, namely the cruelty that would go back to the effects of a cruel/tyrannical superego, is more and more difficult to identify. Cruelty first lies in the experience of adolescence when the child does not manage to preserve a space for thinking absence and desire. Turning to acting out and to the body paradoxically attempts to ensure a sense of narcissistic continuity towards the experience of inner domination and driving break-in. The cruel gesture cools down the hatred enhanced through the experience of puberty and the inability to let go of the first objects of love. Injuring the body comes from a paradoxical attempt to inscribe and erase sexual identity. The cruelty of the gesture, of narcissistic essence, is a precarious solution that aims at freezing driving and identifying movements.