Drifting across the Black Hole: From Prison to the “Recours à l’Acte”

The body plays a particular role in prison and in the “recours à l’acte”. An object of sociological, phenomenological and psychoanalytic theorizations, it also stands at the centre of the subject’s history. The prison world reverberates the subject’s history and their “recours à l’acte”, and modifies their relationship to time, space, and their body. The bodily space-time of the incarcerated subject can warp into a black hole, echoing deep-rooted experiences that mobilise the bodily ego, and confronting them to early trauma. The subject may then develop psychic survival mechanisms through the “recours à l’acte” or during prison time. Weaving together clinical experience and theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, I shall question the psychic processes at play for an incarcerated subject, Julien, to highlight the way he drifts across a black hole during his prison time and through his “recours à l’acte”.