ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the advances in Lacanian theory that have been developed in recent years by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin, and the other analysts and scholars at the Freudian School of Quebec, and the interdisciplinary clinical and research group from which it sprang. These advances involve: first, an extension of Lacan’s primarily linguistic notion of the symbolic order into a more fully articulated ethno-psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious subject in its cultural-civilizational surroundings; and second, an application of this extended theory to the analysis of the disruptions and re-constellations that accompany economic globalization and of the profound effects of these developments on individual subjects today. I begin with a discussion of the notion of “world-formation” in terms of which Apollon and the Québec group summarize the political, socio-cultural, and psychic effects of globalization. Then I describe the structure of the subject of the unconscious, as they conceive it, in relation to language, culture, and civilization. Third, I sketch some of the clinical implications of the resultant notion of the subject of culture in the age of world-formation for an analytic approach to adolescence today. Finally, I consider the role of the aesthetic realm for adolescence and for analytic treatment in the current conjuncture.
