Title:

ADOLESCENTS. Violence versus Spirituality? New -old- arguments to support

discrimination
Author:
Monique

A popular voice said: spirituality does not imply non-violence.

Those who believe in Saint Death do not sound very quiet. There are news ways of
spirituality that work as an emblem of quasi-spirituality.
In the film The Secret, Da Vinci shows an adolescent, very close to the Priests, at the
boarding school he was been brought up at, with a constant whipping whose ideal
leads him to death.
Adolescents claim to be atheists, they believe in a religion but not in God: it is the line
of being that is not belief and, which denies the paternal function. This line of being is
the line of sense whose origin is in the imaginary; first stages of the structuring of a
subject (a-a), where the child hangs from the maternal imaginary, whose wish is
structural not without a father in the structure or in the family. It is the flaw of sense that
lies in that place that we have to work on. (1)
Other adolescents do not even go through religion, denying the being.
Spirituality is the search that a person carries out in order to make a change in what it
is Truth, on the line that stretches from the maternal to the paternal. In order to access
to the Truth, first, there is the need to remove the being from the incorporation of the
maternal Other, after the Self is placed in checkmate, but not before the perforation of
the sense and the extraction of the signifiers which go through his existence. The
movement called Eros (love) begins, going through a treatment of ascesis (virtues),
creating the existence with fictions, which help the apprehension of said Truth.
Spirituality produces effects of counterblows to the originary Truth illuminating the
Being. Truth is on the side of the good, after the substraction of the evil that inhabits
within, granting the subject calmness and serenity; process which requires
indispensably the accommodation and accompaniment of the Other who, through
his/her own Experience of analysis which led to the emptying of his/her own Truth,
could guide through the process of Cure. At this point of concern for oneself, there is no
self-knowledge that is worth in solitude; the results in different modalities of knowing
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oneself are known to foster the originary Self (je), as desperate ants against the threat
of rain.
Restlessness is one of the frameworks of angst, whose object is not recognized by the
subject; moment when the Other is summoned as support for the encounter with said
object. When said summon fails, the subject tries to fill up the void (which the angst
tries to show), with disastrous results: addictions account for that, as they refer to the
stickiness to the Other in the deprivation of desire and words.
Love to the father as subjective time gives Other existence, it marks a need the subject
makes use of when he/she transforms it into dispensable, using words to offer
continuity to said Existence.
All religions pose an ideal of non-violence, of peace. Nevertheless, all extremist groups
of all religions turn to violence; they are the fundamentalists in every religion. The
islamists sacrifice themselves to get to Mohammed, the orthodoxs cast stones to cars if
people are partying. A few years ago, I remember, the sect Children of God in Brazil,
kidnapped and killed in the name of the religion they said to profess.
What is the spirituality that comes off religions like, if the basis of Christianity is in its
separation from Judaism, hate for the murder of its alleged son?
Among Arabs and Jews, the creation of a new state is at stake, which is not
accomplished by means of spirituality but through violence exercised in bloody wars.
They do not take into consideration people who, from the spirituality of music, seek
peace in the Middle East.
Children are instilled nationalism from very early stages from their families; which is
carried out as violence or peace, representing on which side they are. However, even
then, we force them to do military service, as a second round of the registered and to
reassert that said violence is engraved on their minds, if they come home alive.
Psychoanalysis is not ascesis, it is a technique (2) which is not based on reliability but in
belief, one of the fundamental elements for transference to set and the Supposed
Subject of Knowing, without which no analysis is possible. Psychoanalysis is One (two
refers to the end of the analysis, where the Supposed Subject of Knowing turns into a
Subject who acquires knowledge). The unary trait that is inscribed in said patient in
process of the object that causes it; and I say patient because there is a need of a lot of
patience to carry out analysis from both sides: analyst and patient, both absolutely
involved in body and soul through said work.

Kant states as imperative: act as if the maxim of your action were to become will
a universal law, and claims that the voice of conscience or the mandate of heaven is
die-cast in the brain of human beings and they are obliged by it. Kant is Confucian:
one's freedom ends where another person's freedom begins.
Old words for new words, a kitchen that suggests a new table with four legs: a brave
father, a sensible mother, obedient children, obliging siblings. Many of these terms are
valid in our society, when the scourge of drugs, promiscuity and neglect of minors,
along with abuse and violence, that we se every day in the streets, is predominant.
Is violence theirs? On the other hand, is it ours from a center that is no longer hard,
that has ceased to exist? The interpretation is also violent when a subject listens to it,
the discourse of a patient at the first stage of the treatment is violent so much that the
patient touches the analysts body and produces an effect.
In addition, it is that adolescents only reinscribe the past of three previous generations,
what we have sown in a group of people, where there is no question posed as to the
desire of the child, the desire of the mother; and the paternal functionit is better not to
pose questions. State and private organizations are supposed to safeguard children
and adolescents in our society. How do we do that?, I wonder.
The family, membranous organelle, contains the greater part of the material which
informs about evolution, summarizes previous generations. When we dye the center,
we find a deep blue that can only be seen through laboratory methods: that is where
we, analysts, are summoned.
I come back to Confucius, figure above religious or political, who says that sense as
record of the imaginary moves us further away from the ideal of happiness. As reality
imposes unhappiness as the first aim, whose bitter taste, product of a hangover from
an initial drunkenness it must not be forgotten when the effects of the wine that has
been drunk fade. Neither Confucius nor Confucianism asks about the essence of God
about his Existence, immortality or the Existence of Heavens, in the case they existed.
His stance has as ethical code to straighten society and, to hold the sapiens in its
bosom in a quiet, peaceful and reasonable manner. Faced with this, there are only two
ways: the way of good or the way of evil.
Adolescents are subjects of rights, liberties and distinctive protection; they consider
equality of opportunities and non-discrimination as rights, without gender distinction,
nor socioeconomic or cultural conditions. Adolescents do not chase after glory but
after the sensitivity of a State of fact and law.

An adolescent is a mute goldfinch in a flight hindered by interests alien to him that hit
him all the time. This is how I think; this is how I feel. In the cause, the desire passes its
verdict about the fate we can offer him: to respect different ideas and rights, including
dissenting religious beliefs; not to consume psychotropic substances; to respect and
obey his parents or people in charge of him, and this includes teachers and elderly
people; to respect the Nation, laws, flag and national heroes.
Where are all these rights and duties carried out? Alternatively, which darkening of
duties happens that only rights remain and, they are not even clear as to what they
refer to? If adolescents are the only ones that have to answer to said duties and they
do not do that, which is the model we have given them? If adolescents do not know the
reason why March 24 is a holiday, who takes responsibility for the lack of information
that, we know, could lead to the turning around of the production of what the father has
incorporated, as ignorance of the knowledge known but not told.
Adolescents do not care about history because they do not believe in it. They just take
into consideration the instant they live. Who has seen to belief and love to it?, I wonder.
For adolescents the future is unqualified dyslexia that is expressed in an ancestral
aphasia, and many times without name or surname.
To talk about adolescent is to talk about the place of the exception. The social tie has
massiveness close to the drugs considered strong. They are massified primitive
deliriums we are used to calling orgies, initiated by the Greeks in Ancient Greece. The
tragedy tells The King of Thebes, maximum authority at that moment, forbids the
worshiping of Dionysus, as he was not considered a god. Dionysus slowly lures
Pentheus to the woods where the women, in an insane frenzy, are in the throes of an
orgy in which Pentheus also participates without knowing that he is the son of one of
them, Agave. The Maenads torn Pentheus to shreds, tear his limbs off, and it his
mother the one that carries his body as a trophy.
Drugs and madness have historically been a constant in the period called adolescence.
The necessary massiveness in order to give way to an outburst is a time of the social
tie where the phallus awaits as a paradox. The mass believes in its leaders, paternal
substitutes Sigmund Freud left us as his legacy. The sexual concessions carried out by
some or by everybody establish an intense cause. To make sexual concessions with
many is a sexual difference or an oral issue, from which they cannot do away with as
part of the rite of incorporation and subsequent, identification to the group. We will
agree to call Other within adolescence to this time that summons us, as the time of the
phallus, without the exception of the belief that leads to craziness of drugs in the group.
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At a second stage, this falls, as everything else: failure, frustration and deprivation
tolerated or not by the structure, they are part of it, they are logical times that a subject
needs inevitably to travel.
We could refer to any example that points this out: we come back to the mass suicide
in the concert at the end of the year to refresh our memory.
Do you really believe that this does not guarantee a way out? The cause is only
reducible when the thought can operate; if and only if, the state of exception
decreases, and because we take into consideration that the phallus is always a flaw in
all-human structure. Madness or mental weakness is the dilemma to solve in everyone.
To prohibit is to take a risk that places the mistake on the Others account, as it does
not find lack or the signifying writing. The mistake is also inevitable as part of the
structure. The phallus has to fall: there has been no kingdom that has not given in, and
this brings about consequences.
To crown the phallus is taking it away from the object a; but the phallic belief and, and
its suggestive-addictive effect, are necessary as a first step.
If the object a has the crown, it is because the difference is necessary and mandatory,
as a norm of the phallus in the previous one, in order to subsequently be able to have a
sexual initiation in absence, whether it is a man or a woman. There is no sexual
initiation because it is part of a structure where the enigma functions representing the
phallus in a surplus, in which the organ sets an impasse to jouissance and surplusjouissance.
Adolescence presents itself as an eclipse where the group functions as the moon
covering the sun. The phallus is also a veil to the sense of the obscene, the phallus as
false inscription, establishing itself against the inExistence of the value of truth in some
place.
The adolescent errs (does not fail); that falsehood of the phallus comes as value of
truth, where falsehood is a cause as witness, and in that place, the fellow sets his
borders in suspense of the function that supports the phallus.
The adolescent never reaches the sense in the same place; that is why he can have a
sexual relationship knowing it will be an only time: a faux pas leads to symptom, as a
the location of the enigma, where the flaw in the structure is shown again; a stumble is
not a fall. By not reaching the sense we could feel affection, when feeling erupts as a
path, when the sense stays behind as a track, and this is where the metaphor pulls

over, finding the parking lot in the sexual. There is a path of sense as a border to the
sexual.
The lack of sexual initiation and the first opening of the unconscious is produced hastily
in adolescence, placing a patch as feeling to the path from sense to functioning, or not,
to object a. The position of the no is sustained by the phallus, a tip of the real that gives
way to the path of sense on which we have to work without hasting the interpretation
of the word, as a time of opening that has not yet been produced and that implies the
hasty acceptance of a closure, when there has not been an opening yet.
Adolescence, time of mental virginity, non-genital, a path of sense towards another
virginity that is the emergence of the unconscious as a game: it has no chronological
age, explanation is unnecessary; we all know the beautiful indifference of the hysteria.
It is necessary to lose virginity not without an analyst in whose act the law of incest is
marked, recognizing the location of its void and inhabited by it, which is always lived as
violent and maddening, at the meeting point between sense and signification, breaking
the thin tissue that binds them and leaving the subject absorbed in the cause. It is
necessary to lose virginity with an analyst because of the originary flaw the subject has,
which is a sign of flaw in the law that originates him. The analyst is the name of the
father: desire and law.
Virginity, sense and opening of the unconscious are a mark of an inevitable violence as
a step to a state of free thinking and election, which the adolescent will have to travel
publicly, scene after scene, frame after frame, until he arrives at a ghost created in the
laboratory, caused by an analysis. The analyst directs the play creating the places
where the adolescent will play the game of the Other. The patient will act sensing each
character in the film, whenever the baton of a conductor indicates it, in which every
scene will have different tonalities from each instrument, in each of the staves, as a
new unconscious writing a polyphonic choir will sing, at the toll of the bells, for the
premiere, each time, at the end of the session.
The WHO recognizes puberty as the first stage of adolescence, starting at the age of
ten and ending in youth at the age of twenty-four, passing through middle adolescence
at the age of fifteen. It estimates that one every five people in the world are an
adolescent: 85 % live in poor countries or of middle income, and around 1.7 million of
them die every year. Deaths that could be avoided if we design a prevention program
as from childhood. A program that directed to the improvement of their quality of life
and development through the fostering of culture, school, health, as a token of
thankfulness for the passing of this life, avoiding in this way, drugs as a scourge, the
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fundamentalist tendencies, illiteracy, indolence and desertion as lack of desire and

projects.
The schools should have guiding offices for specific issues to establish clear diagnoses
and follow-up of each of the members of a group in the school and for each of the
groups in the school. The guidance should not only be addressed to schooling but to
the state of the mental, familiar situation, and the relationship with peers of each
adolescent. After the drawing up of this report, the guidance office should report to the
State so the state could create centers for primary care for this population range with
highly qualified staff, whose task would entail a permanent link with family and school,
without neglecting the health of the adolescent. In this way, State, School and Family
would be greatly bound to get society ahead.
Without State there is no School. Whit no School there is no Family. With no Family
there are no adolescents. Without adolescents: there is no life!
Adolescents have always been marginalized in our society: what it is not understood, it
is left aside, fast and simply, due to the lack of resources of the professionals in the
field. They are a Model of social exclusion that encompasses an important sector in the
emergency rooms in hospitals. In France, they are called socially maladjusted. They
have a break in the sense of belonging, as a horizontal label representing society as a
universe. The psychiatric hospitals can no longer hold so many evicted. There is a
special ward for adolescents, where they are hidden as they are considered the
dangerous ones from the branch of the great Other. The path to action is at the order of
the day on any menu in these degrading family deposits. Isolation leads to madness
the environment itself produces: in every group, there is an emergent one.
We create kindergartens to admit them, and to discharge them, luckily, at the age of
eighteen. If they stray, we punish them without measuring the severity and; if they
rebel, we admit them to ensure the isolation as a way to control our own madness and
not theirs.
From ancient times, in our profession, in its several ways of theorizing and reality,
adolescence has been the habitual intermediate frequency to adjust the values of
use/ disuse of the period, as the current profit needed it. The adolescents are
merchandise of exchange and the greatest consumers of all times. Today and now. Is it
better for us not to look at them?, I wonder.
We resign ourselves to them, we do not even begin the struggle to know when the
problem begins: teenage pregnancy, AIDS, juvenile delinquency, are all different ways
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of naming the lack of venture in values and, of information, parents blame on

education, on teachers and the system; and this to other greater emergencies.
Let us explore other aspect: if the age of legal responsibility for minors is lowered, we
have another reclusion: jail. There is no longer any reference to juvenile detention
facilities, but in Enrique Medinas writings. Then, what are we going to come up with in
order not to take responsibility? The guillotine still coming down on their heads?
Fewer children are born, they are medicated, and adolescents are separated. We want
an elderly population with little life. What a desolate planet!, the rose said to the Little
Prince. That is a horror story I would like to change instead of imagining it.
Violence in adolescents increases considerably year after year and at earlier ages. It is
alleged that they do not conform to rules, that they are impulsive, intolerant and nonconformist.
We tolerate the education we provide for them from all the sectors. Would we tolerate if
we were in their place? Would we tolerate listening to the same educational program
that has existed for the past forty-five years? Moreover, with no evidence whatsoever of
the possibility of using resources close to the respective interests, as a computer would
be. Would we tolerate having been brought to this world in the name of love to make
us work nine hours a day wearing a deluxe uniform and to, eventually, go out to work
overtime, with a salary consisting of a good PC to use surreptitiously or a two-week
holiday, where the parents fight for insignificant reasons? Would we tolerate the neverending reproaches of what is been done for us, when we do not ask for any of those
things and; we are not even interested in, when we are not asked what we are
interested in or what we desire?
Thanks, they are alive and kicking. I admire how much they resist, until we devise oldnew arguments to go on discriminating what it is different, something Sigmund Freud
told us one hundred years ago.
Remember that in every violent adolescent there is, at least, one parent who is also
violent, and/ or somebody from previous generations. Let us remember that
mistreatment is a part of a family and it is one of the main obstacles in the development
of a child. Poverty and its derivates often lead to outbursts and lack of hope, placing
them in deep sadness due to lack of belonging.
A policy of change must aim to communication as the base of all human being,
honoring the value of the words in every sphere. The policy has to try to dignify the
lives of the Argentineans that were gagged during the long years of the Process when
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we were silent witnesses, and even spectators, of the cowardly flight at an important
moment. I remember myself watching television thinking: how and how much the new
generation would pay for this; how many generations would pay for it; and how to
forget the United People. People marched on the streets with the orality in their hands
in order to stun our representatives that did not represent the people, representatives in
whom we falsely trust fraud after fraud. This is the pain of the citizens that would not
forget, because it is healthy to remember. While we professionals work in silence in
hospitals or in centers providing health care with the One for One: encouraging and
exclusive payment for the satisfaction of the cure of a symptom, of the recovery of a
patient, the restitution of the value of our cause: movement for the people that summon
us.
Facing the absolute decline of the paternal function and its institutions, we accept and
take on the value of our times in the good manner that characterizes us as responsible
people of the position we do not hold, because we do not exercise obscenity. The
doors to the classrooms in the School of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires
know this. The doors of this School on Independencia Street are witnesses. The
wooden doors, called blind, have glass windowpanes placed on them in order to watch
and control people during the military period in our country.
In order not to take one step forward and two backwards, we will suggest a group
discussion that will include the adolescents as the true architects of the present and the
future, turning them from scapegoats to ones adopted through love, whose voice will
be heard as the proposal for a serious change. They hold the knowing of two
generations and the knowing of the future in their desires and hopes.
Violence affects us all and they are not the ones that produce it; they are the affected
ones due to the lack of reading of the reality in which we are immersed, but whose
sensitivity is prone to capture the real better.
To work on issues concerning differences makes the position of a subject in relation to
sexual stereotypes different; it allows them to overcome the poles of violence and
submission or defenselessness.
From the School we will not try to label, punish, reject or set apart the children who
present difficulties or conflicts. Communication with parents should be open and
permanent, not creating an obstacle in the way of a communication notebook. Parents
need and deserve assistance in their functioning, with special stress on the time we
are, a period of National Reparation.

We do not want new religions, but a State of free thinking in body and soul, that allows
the coexistence of plurality, aiming at singularity; where the word and its reading are
the base of our National institution. Religion is sustained by faith: the irrational.
Psychoanalysis is sustained by the belief as a reference to the love for the father.
The problems adolescents face at present have been the same ones for years; it just
increases the intensity the scourges such as drugs, alcohol, tobacco,
anorexia/bulimia/obesity, and sexuality stand out.
The level of aggressiveness and violence has increased significantly in recent years, in
a way showing the relationship with the social environment they live in as a reflection:
family, friends, among others.
We should not forget that the family is the log in a flight that will determine its landing or
its previous sabotage, and whose landing will always be abrupt, because adolescence
does not contemplate smooth ways to show itself in society and, it has never been.
When a flight takes off, only the teacher-pilot .is in charge-, the teachers would be the
flight attendants that will assist or neglect the passengers. When the flight finishes, the
ones who could get onboard will have a safe landing with an earthquake-like feeling
that adolescence has ended. They will unbuckle the safety belt and will leave the
parachute under the seat so other could take the place the replacement represents.
I hope to see many adolescents flying as Juan Salvador Gaviota did, because he learnt
from his teachers and could always come back to his flock, as I myself could learn from
ours to, eventually, bequeath to others.
We learn, in this way, the value of freedom for the fair use of the healthy habit of living
in a pleasant society, built on our own deeds.
My generation from Students Centers says Present! to discussion.
My generation of Psychoanalysts says Present!, and we offer ourselves to Society as
the Framework of Consultation and Organization of the sectors to repair. We dive into
the ditch of the only trade we know: the work for the word badly said, the word badly
written. This is because the unconscious is full of words and letters; the rest is history.
To unveil the obscure, to take to light the nightmares of our history, assures us a decent
present and a promising future within the borders of our humanity.
There come to mind the words Anna Frank uttered: Love adolescents and understand
in the essence the value of the word future. I do not think in pain, but in the beauty of
what it is to come. She said that.

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References:
Paola Daniel: Unconscious, sense and foreclosure. Editorial L. Viva. 2011
Paola Daniel: http://pablobenavides1.blogspot.com/2010/06/psicoanalisis-conadolescentsdaniel.html
Lacan in Tokio, 21-4-71, translation EFBA.

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