Surely you remember Tanguy, the main character of the eponymous film released in 2001? Snapshot of an adolescent, not at all eager to leave his childhood, this young man of 28 who still lived with his parents loved, it is probable, both his parents and the comfort that they gave him… The term adulescent is a neologism: it designates the young adult who continues to have a behavior comparable to that which adolescents generally have. But why do these adulescents refuse to grow taller?

The term adulescent is a portmanteau word, a contraction of the word adult, which means “the one who has finished growing up”, and of the word “adolescent”, a term qualifying “the one who is in the process of growing up”. This term is used to designate the fringe of young people who, aged approximately 24 to their early thirties, seek to become psychologically independent.

And, in fact, “since the 1950s, the youth has been growing at both ends“, Explained to Echoes sociologist Olivier Galland, author of Sociology of youth. Indeed : “One of the paradoxes, and not the least, of our Western society, is both to make children grow up too quickly, and at the same time to encourage them to remain adolescents as long as possible!“, Wrote in The Studies Tony Anatrella, specialist in social psychiatry.

It’s a fact: pre-teens are getting older and younger, adulthood comes later and later. And the high unemployment of young people has nothing to dissipate this phenomenon, because it delays their material and financial independence as much … Finally, it will very often be with the arrival of the first child, moreover more and more late, when adulthood will truly begin.

«What characterizes them most adulescents, wrote Tony Anatrella, inventor of this term, behind the very convivial side that they know how to use in relationships with others, it is the search for self-confidence, the need to fight against doubt in the face of existence and to lift inhibitions at the idea of affectively engage. ” These young people are in what is also called “post-adolescence” are still in a phase of adjustment of their personality.

And indeed, for psychotherapist Catherine Feldman, “if adolescence is, for some, a passage, like a farewell rite to childhood, for others it reflects a real difficulty in assuming responsibility in society as an adult, in taking responsibility, and more deeply , to find landmarks that can help give meaning to adult life.«

Adulescents have sometimes been brought up with parents who refused to pass on the values, in all their rigidity, that they themselves had received from their parents. For lack of sufficient references, adulescents would tend to create their own values, “until they can find others, more solid“, Says Dr. Catherine Feldman.

Loana and Steevy, big stars of reality TV, were products of this media world which gave everyone the desire to become their own star, to be recognized where the subject fails to recognize himself. in what he experiences on a daily basis. And thus, to remain in the narcissism of adolescence. 

In fact, our social context favors adolescence, within a paradoxical atmosphere where, on the one hand, “the aim is to make the children autonomous as soon as possible, from nursery school and nursery school; at the same time, we observe adolescents, and especially post-adolescents, who find it difficult to perform the psychic operations of separation – which, however, listening to them, they wish“, Explains Tony Anatrella.

We can underline that by so magnifying childhood and adolescence, society masks the pleasure that there can also be in growing up, in existing as an adult. “It then appears complex to free oneself from the modes of gratification of childhood in order to access higher satisfactions.“, Indicates the psychiatrist. The lengthening of the life is another factor which explains the adolescence, suggesting that the individual has time to prepare, to engage in the existence.

The fuzzy conception of existence is inherent in adolescents, in youth understood as the time of indecision, as a time when most possibilities remain open … It is worrying if it persists in post-adolescents: thus, uncertain in their motivations, they come to have no confidence in themselves.

«Many delay deadlines and live in the interim, not knowing whether they will be able to continue what they have started in the various areas of existence. Still others live the time of youth as an end in itself and as a state that lasts.“, Says Tony Anatrella.

Another significant fact: a form of crisis of interiority. Many young people find it difficult to occupy their interior, psychological life, and will therefore tend to situate themselves solely in action. This joins, here, the problem of the transmission of the contemporary world … However: as soon as these young people discover the richness, in particular, of the texts and the founding events of the meaning of the human person, they wonder why their educators failed to initiate them. … We come back to the basics: transmitting, educating.

The philosopher Maurice Bellet challenged, thus: “What have we received? What do we need to convey to younger people that allows them to stand up and walk in life without breaking their necks?» 

Tony Anatrella believes, in fact, that adulescents are the result of an education, of an emotional relationship that has kept them in the primary gratifications of childhood. “Education, he writes, in his legitimate concern to ensure the quality of relationships with the child, has been too focused on emotional well-being, sometimes to the detriment of realities, knowledge, cultural codes and moral values. , not helping young people to build themselves up internally“. Thus, the adults believed that they would make them more autonomous, very young in childhood, considering that they should be free in their desires. 

In fact, in their narcissistic expansion, these adulescents have personalities that are certainly sympathetic, but which can turn out to be very superficial. They sometimes do not have a sense of limits or of reality.

These post-adolescents, however, aspire to enter life. Their self, the construction of their Self, is fragile, their temporal vision often reduced to the desires of the moment and the event. Their temporal maturity is inconsistent: very often, everyday life appears to them as a time of waiting to experience exceptional moments, instead of being the space for the weaving of the commitment of their existence.

Most, “adolescence is not inevitable, insists Tony Anatrella. It is possible to promote a more realistic education, which does not enclose the mental objects and narcissism of adolescence, but which develops the interest of becoming an adult. “