Marked bodies: expressions of psychological suffering in adolescence in dark times

Abstract

Faced with the fraying of social ties and the collapse of symbolic matrices, adolescence is experienced under the aegis of the sacrifice of living in “dark times”. This article proposes a psychoanalytic reading of scarification as an expression of adolescent suffering, not reduced to destructiveness, but understood as an attempt to register the subject in the face of the unrepresentable and a way of (sur)viving in society. Based on a theoretical-clinical methodology, with the use of psychoanalytic clinical vignettes, the gesture of cutting oneself is presented as a precarious form of symbolization in the face of excessive drives, environmental failure, and as a cry for help that is made in the environment in which the adolescent lives. The analyst’s listening, supported by the ethics of psychoanalysis, emerges as a possibility of transforming pain into words and acts into narratives. In this context, of cultures based on “dark times”, the psychoanalytic clinic emerges as a space that can be considered an “epitome of love”, of support in the face of helplessness, where the adolescent can overcome the pain and suffering of existence.