Law and desire at the clinic with teenagers

Abstract

The present work briefly addresses the specificity of the clinic in a Detention Center for Adolescents, of the assistance with adolescents who comply with a “socio-educational measure”, through judicial referral. It takes into account both Lacan and Freud, pointing out the desire inextricably linked to the Law that institutes the symbolic, which indicates more than a prohibition, the presence of impossibility. In some cases, the adolescent, in his Act, circumvents the Law, in a paradoxical movement of overcoming it and proving the possibility of reaching fullness, and at the same time in a demand for containment, seeking in the State, a protection / accountability that promotes appeasement from anguish and give him a place in the world. In addition, the text proposes the possibility of listening to this adolescent subject and his suffering, taking into account, mainly, the ethics of psychoanalysis, which, far from proposing a moral discourse, is the ethics of desire based on the reference of human action to the Real, to the impossible of enjoyment. In the bet of a listening that allows the subject to bear the reality that invades him and that he takes responsibility for the evil he complains about.

Keywords:

Adolescent, Psychoanalysis, Desire, Law, Ethics.