Confrontations; About the Gesture and the Word

Abstract

Starting out from Winnicott’s focus on adolescence, this paper underlines some structural aspects of the changing process and the finding of new meanings during the referred to period. The adolescent’s gesture-verbal language (mainly during the first stage of
adolescence) continues a little longer with the saying-representing of children’s play, which explains why adolescent discourse has its own features and thus also makes up a unique analytic encounter. The expression “confrontation’ used by Winnicott helps to understand some of the specific features of such encounters, in which it is so important for the adolescent to find new meanings to his losses (psychological and bodily changes), that these need to be symbolized. This paper suggests thinking about gestures like a language, since they work with the same laws of language, in a kind of metonymical chaining which prepares or leads to the creation of a meaning (within the framework of the setting made up by fantasy). Finally, with a Freudian example of “symptomatic actions”, the paper points out how the strength of gestures leads to an analytic listening which includes the immediacy of response to them. Pieces of transference are marked out and taken into account.