Semiotics and Psychoanalysis: Towards a Model of Adolescent Behavior and Discourse

Abstract

The necessities linked with the construction of a an ethosemiotic model of adolescent behavior and discourse naturally lead to a conceptual encounter with psychoanalysis and also to the attempt to integrate the notion of phantom in the semiotic model itself. Complementary to the semiotics of the body, psychoanalysis offers from the start the first fruits of a semiotics of the psychic in keeping with Freud. The phantom is the central theme, the new virtual semiotic unit consisting of a signified “in search of a signifier”.

The phantom of auto-generation, phantasmatic scene that we have been placing for the past ten years at the center of the adolescent’s psychic economy, allows us to construct the ethosemiotic model searched for insofar as the semiotic links between the body and the psychic finally appear as well as the conversions that open towards the verbal and non-verbal discursive productions.

This new generative model underlines the signification generation disorder that adolescent behavior and discourse reveal which also feed renewed educative and therapeutic conceptions.