Les mangas ou l’imaginaire amoureux des adolescentes

Mangas were imported to France from Japan. They mainly target adolescent readers and spread contemporary juvenile fashions sticking closely to changes in society and ways of thinking. This article deals specifically with mangas of the “shôjo” type, read by adolescent girls, and shows how their content deals with the questions the girls ask themselves during adolescence. During their psychoanalytic treatment, a number of adolescent girls mentioned reading them and feeling transported back to everyday experiences, as well as relating the mangas to their daydreams and fantasies, and their emotional life in general. This article draws on a few mangas, exploring both the manifest and latent content of their drawings and onomatopoetic allusions in the context of psychosexual concepts and processes specific to adolescence. Discovering love and its turmoil, establishing one's female identity out of psychic bisexuality, and typical adolescent concerns about gender roles are dealt with by those mangas, and their stories relate the conflicting nature of those complex problems. Reflecting core themes such as identity, love and sexuality, mangas echo the adolescent girl's development of “selfhood”, through questioning about “subject” and “being”. For some time, they back up psychological motions such as identificatory and identity affirmation as well as distancing, within the foundation of an Oedipus schema. Because they picture an “Elsewhere”, mangas allow adolescent girls to break away from their familiar world, opening up to otherness and adulthood.