What is an Adult?
I opened my phone. An algorithm had decided to force a memory back into view: she was kissing me on the cheek. It was several years ago, when I still had a taste for adventure, and when I was riding the waves of infinite contingency. It felt as though it were a long lost memory that had resurfaced, but from a prior self, one whose flame had been extinguished. I shall never again feel it. Indeed, I barely remember, except as if through a screen. There was something beautiful about the moment, and yet, at the same time, there does not exist within me anything more than the slightest temptation to return to it. It is best as a cinematic effect: I’ll watch it here, from a distance.
There are anecdotes within the psychoanalytic milieu about prominent or pioneering analysts who have claimed to have not outgrown processes or structures of the fifth or sixth years.
Why?
One explanation is that psychoanalysis has its own way of thinking about the question of age. While the sociologist might ask a question about the dwindling or shrinking period of childhood (which seems to be giving way to adulthood much earlier), or about the social construction of age or age categories, the vulgar scientist/biologist shall restrict themselves to a linear developmental metric: you cannot change your age, which makes age a real of science. It is fascinating how the real of science is today being used as leverage into cultural debates concerning other strata advanced and made popular by the sociologists (e.g., “if you cannot identify as a toddler when you are 40 years old, then why can you identify as a woman when you have a penis or XY chromosomes?”).
On the one hand, there is the advancement of the real of science, which, in its own way, returns to a crystallization of meaning: the numbers don’t change, and they are governed by another frame, which is, within psychoanalysis, what we call the field of the Other. It is here, precisely, that science advances beyond itself, in spite of itself. Hence, the sincere scientists or biologists might retreat from the linear count by claiming that age is best measured through metabolism, etc. On the other hand, social constructionists now advance a social construction of everything approach. Some have even attempted to force dating apps, such as Tinder, to recognize their ‘identification’ with a younger age. This demonstrates the slippage of the crystallization of the meaning toward a real. In either case, then, whether that of vulgar science or extreme social constructionism, the real and the imaginary seem to be at interplay with one another.
What is an Adult?
It is not so different from the question ‘What is a Woman?,’ except that it does not come with a presupposition. What some critics fail to notice is that the absence of a definition is also possible: first, the indefinite article suggests that it operates according to ‘one-by-one,’ and, second, the absence of a definition avoids the certainty of a redundancy: ‘a woman is a woman.’ Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, begins with ‘the woman does not exist,’ which avoids the anxiety of the scientists and the delirium of the social constructionists. Whereas the scientists, especially those who go looking for the radical kernel of female subjectivity in genes and chromosomes, get no further than their phallic symbolization, the sociologists cannot escape the madness of their own certainty.
An adult is not one who has undergone some developmental milestones but rather one who, having shed the skin of their pretensions and elevated themselves above the chaos of their innermost urges, can finally be the child that she or he was always meant to be.
