Adolescer: crescer para (quê)? “Por que no mundo não existem apenas crianças?”

Abstract

The motivation behind this monograph arises from the encounter with boys living on the streets and abusing drugs who, despite having gone through puberty, seem not to have entered adolescence. The methodology used to develop the main arguments consisted of a bibliographic research interspersed with clinical fragments. Our analysis was based on the thesis developed by Alexandre Stevens (2004), according to which adolescence is a symptom of puberty, in connection with the reflections of Domenico Cosenza (2015), who argues that there is a difficulty in contemporary adolescents to symptomatize adolescence. Starting from these propositions, and taking into account that, based on clinical experience, we were unable to locate such a symptom in some subjects, we refer to clinical fragments that lead us to consider the idea that Freud (1916-1917) called hilfskonstruktionen, a term borrowed from the writer Theodor Fontane. We argue, thus, that in the absence of adolescence as a symptom in its metaphorical sense, and facing the helplessness brought about in puberty, some subjects manage to maintain their lives by finding other solutions that go beyond the use of drugs and the trajectory on the streets, and which may function as a protective support, or in Freudian terms, as auxiliary constructions.