Abstract:
This article defends a double hypothesis: that an implicit theorisation of puberty is a necessity among psychoanalytic authors who have not dealt with this subject (because of its logical importance); that Lacan’s own theorisation can be extracted from an article by Jacques-Alain Miller, L’Autre de l’Autre. In the movement from l’Autre de l’Autre to il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre - which corresponds to the shift between Seminar V and the following seminars - the step taken by Lacan can resemble the journey of the child’s entrance into puberty: the fall of the imaginary father of Oedipus and the revelation of S(A). We could therefore say that, unbeknownst to him, a paradigm change in an author’s theory has its own theoretical value (akin to Freud’s movement from the first to the second topography), which should be discovered.
Keywords:
adolescence; puberty; Lacan; paradigm; theory.