At the outset of a curative practice, psychoanalytic theorizing - especially that having to do with jouissance - will be seen to provide a singularly sound and secure foundation for understanding how the behaviour patterns of drug addiction set in, and why adolescence is such a fertile terrain for behaviour patterns of this kind. Such an approach, centred as it is on the fantasies that underlie a defective object-relation, as well as on the unconscious repercussions of drug addiction, has made it possible to refine the preventive methods advocated for more than a decade by Professor Frydman of the University of Mons-Hainaut (Belgium).

Two basic errors are to be denounced in the area of clinical treatment:

1- Mistaking any feature of addictive behaviour for a structure. In other words, we must guard against automatically taking anyone who "smokes a joint" to be a drug addict, refrain from authenticating this as a symptom, except of course as a symptom of a request - which then points to something other than the substance on which the drug addict is hooked.

2- Restricting the field of drug addictions to hard drugs, for this would amount to endorsing, in the name of science, the social misunderstanding whereby jouissance is associated almost entirely with consumer-like behaviour. Thus from an ethical point of view the question we need to consider - and which is inseparable from any intervention on a social level - is: "What is the social cost of drug addiction, what is at stake socially (apart from a growing blight on contemporary society; although this is scarcely beginning to be recognized, if at all, as a social symptom)?"

It will be seen rereading Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that the question of the choice of object is the point of intersection between the drug addict and the adolescent. Adolescence, indeed, is characterized by the full acknowledgement, both through the gaze of the other and on a strictly narcissistic level, of the subject's having asserted his identity as a sexual being - that is to say by his passing from auto-eroticism to object-sexuality... Puberty thus represents the final stage in the consolidation of phallic primacy in the sphere of human sexuality.

What characterizes this sphere is that everyone within it must recognize himself as lacking. The Phallus is the signifier of lack, in that fundamental psychic formation which is fantasy, whose function is to organize the subject's relation to his lack and to defer the assault of his jouissance. Law (i.e. prohibition) is thus at the basis of socialization, insofar as the latter requires and demands the deferment of drive-satisfaction.

Hence what the adolescent must appropriate in order to enter the adult world is not the attributes of man or woman but a (symbolic) lack which binds him to a story yet to be written.

Within this framework, the social is autentification of the pubescent youth in the conclusion of a pact in which recognition of the subject is inscribed in return for his speech and takes the form of an "I've heard you". In this sense the adolescent distinctly loses his infant status (infans, "non-speaker"), since from then on his speech is taken into account. The teachings of J. Lacan (especially his lessons on the object-relation) serve to throw light on this symbolic transmission, of which an instance may be seen in the sacrament of confirmation.

Thus psychoanalysis teaches us that adolescence may be understood as the passing from one kind of jouissance to another: the giving up of a jouissance toute1, permitted or promised, for a kind of jouissance which is essentially prohibited and yet organized by the resulting Oedipus and castration complexes. This narcissistic, infantile

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1 In Lacanian terminology: plain (narcissistic) jouissance, without any relation to the other.

jouissance reappears socially on those occasions of Dionysian rejoicing which punctuate social life. The outburst of delight or jouissance seen during pagan festivities is evidence both of a form of jouissance apparently not subject to law and also of the manner in which this law asserts itself again: from the outside. Such popular outbursts of jubilation are literally a provocation (etymologically, a "call outside") of the Father, (in the name) of the Law.

For the being endowed with speech, the prohibition of jouissance embodies the impossibility of achieving jouissance on the level of the real2, and the phallus symbolically vouches for the subject's existence. Drug addiction, conversely, represents an attempt to retain something, however little, of this promise of jouissance on the level of the real. Being boundless, this promise can only be resolved in death, which is the only true realization of the impossible, whether it take the form of Dr. Faust's contract; of the impossible love of Tristan and Isolde - bound together by a poison, let us not forget -; of the path travelled slowly by the smoker or the alcoholic; or the heroin addict's frantic course towards fatal overdose: death alone can answer with the final incontrovertible limit.

Thus the drug addict may be distinguished by a non phallic kind of jouissance, akin to the Ich-Libido kind of jouissance (Freud, 1908, p. 144), [which] "becomes amenable to analysis only when it has seized hold upon sexual objects". The drug addict seems to indulge in this form of jouissance, since he diverts part of his libido outside the symbolic sphere.

The drug addict experiences his lack as a genuine lack. Now this lack refers to a symbolic object: the object of the drug addict's lack is a symbolic law organizing the real and which may authenticate this lack. Since this is the case, the slide which we see in such clinics as employ drug substitutes as the first step in a psychic cure is the product of an analytical aberration, for to identify a genuine (psychic) lack as the lack

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2 Also in Lacan: that which is excluded from the symbolic, from the network of signifiers which build up the reality of the world, and which is therefore unknowable.

of an actual object is to draw a veil over what is really at issue, namely a deficiency of law. The transference should rather avail itself of a genuine preliminary no, being the agent, the creator of the lack; the idea being to lead the drug addict to recognize the imaginary form of the missing object (the phallus regulating the fantasy) so that he can come to terms with his non-fulfilment in practice: which is known as enduring castration, and calls for sublimation... And beyond that, socialization.

As the Paris psychoanalyst C. Melman recommended, organizing small groups is probably the best way to get a dialogue going again, so as to restore in the drug addict sufficient confidence in the other person, who in turn supports the drug addict's defective self-image, involving the very status of the communicative act or énonciation. In this way speech may have a therapeutic effect on frustration (imaginary lack) through the subject's ability, not merely to endure this symbolic lack (castration), but to come to terms with himself fully in respect of it, so that he might thereafter write his story.

Thus the discord of jouissance between drug addiction and adolescence is a discord between, on the one hand, a phallic jouissance whose forbidden ness defines a field of social relations regulated by a loss, a relinquishment; and, on the other hand, a jouissance aspiring to absoluteness and whose only credible limit is death. The latter kind of jouissance fosters a growing addiction to a substance supposed to enable us to escape contingencies... The drug addict and the adolescent are bound together by the discord which they both harbour between a promise of jouissance and their social identification as responsible subjects (i.e. as subjects consciously accepting the castration of the Law and the relinquishment it involves with respect to jouissance). The adolescent discord, being as yet unsettled, is for this reason a precarious one; but if the question remains, "For the sake of what are we intervening?" (since both drug addict and adolescent frequently challenge us on this point), then we must frankly acknowledge the consequences of our failure to intervene in a preventive sense: the drug addict, as an addict, as one who demands always more, is not far from embodying the ideal consumer... A choice thus remains to be made, and which is a matter for the city's laws; this choice is a political one.

Marc Dubois: "Adolescence and drug addiction: discord of jouissance". Paper presented at the First International Congress of Adolescentology, Assisi, Italy, October 22 – 24, 1993.

Key Words: Jouissance, Phallus, Object-relation, Drug Addiction, Fantasy, Drive.