In this talk, Dr Carol Owens will explore the contours of the contemporary adolescent psychoanalytic clinic from the point of view of her own Irish Lacanian practice and orientation. Dr Owens will focus in upon the knots and tensions immanent in the work with young people in the hope of mobilising an investigation of the manner in which adolescent symptoms – those pertaining by definition to what we may think of as ‘the liminal’ – may be understood as specific responses to a rapidly changing and increasingly impermanent Symbolic order.

Along the way, Dr Owens will explain how she applies Lacan’s Note on the Child of 1969 to the contemporary adolescent clinic. Taking into consideration Lacan’s first principle that the child’s symptom answers to what is symptomatic in the family structure/sexual couple, we will think about what that could possibly mean for young people of so-called blended families, often growing up now as the first generation of divorced couples in Ireland. Secondly, we wil look at how Lacan’s second principle that the child’s symptom is correlated with the mother’s fantasy plays out in the clinic of adolescence. The talk will also connect up this second principle with a moment in Lacan’s 20th seminar Encore where he speaks of the woman finding a way to supplement her jouissance with her child.

Dr Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Dublin. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on her work with adolescents and more broadly about Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and practice at the intersections of culture and society. Her latest publication is the Gradiva award nominated Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods (Lexington, 2023) with Michael O Loughlin and Louis Rothschild.