Psychopathologie de l'errance dans ses rapports avec la culture contemporaine

The increasing phenomenum of wandering for young people in our cities led many clinical psychopathologists specialists of adolescence to pay more attention to it, and to try and understand its fundamental psychopathological motivations. In general, studies on adolescence insist on the relations between the symptomatic outward signs and the social and cultural organisation. The phase of adolescence is related so much, to the world in which it develops. As well as presenting a synthetic picture of the psychopathology of wandering, this study suggests the reading of hypothesis concerning the links it has with some aspects of contemporary culture. If the clinical observations and the anthropological works have constantly stressed the lack of rituals in life and lack of symbols in space, it seems to us that modern culture has nowadays created around the concept of “programme”, a way of structuring the connection to the world, founded on science and technique that must be taken in to account. Our hypothesis is that psychopathology of wandering for young people seems to be in opposite to this way of structuring, and sometimes, its rejection through its symptoms.