Idealization and psychic transmission in adolescence: interpretation of an event of violence in Chile

The purpose of this article is to examine the murder of a young homosexual committed in Chile in 2012 and analyze this event of violence in relation to the imaginaries of contemporary Chilean society and to the processes of idealization and psychic transmission. With this objective we develop a theoretical interpretation that associates psychoanalytic elaborations on the role of the cultural superego and of idealization during the adolescent passage and the interrelation between the ethnical-political dialectic and the ethical-moral dialectic in the Theory of Mediation. The proposed association highlights the power of the social ideals of control and rejection of the other on the processes of subjective appropriation of adolescence. Thus, we propose an approach to this event of violence that seeks to interrelate the psychic and interpsychic processes of adolescence and the subjectivation processes that constitute the social experience, of the adolescents and young people of today’s Chile.