The crossing of adolescence: a psychoanalytic analysis of "Spirited Away"

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: The adolescence is taken by different approaches when seen in another time frame, being important to reflect about other authors. However, the focus of this present study is based on psychoanalysis which proposes to see this moment as a crossing path, a moment of transition to adulthood, characterized by the emergence of secondary sexual  characteristics, as well as psychic characteristics that reverberates when it encounters the unknown. The piece Spirited Away tells the story of ten-year-old girl Chiriho Ogino, who is moving to a new city with her parents. Taking the movie as a metaphor for becoming a teenager in contemporaneity, this study searches to understand the difficulties of adolescence through the story lived by Chihiro. For developing this study, was chosen, as methodology, documentary research. METHOD:  the articulation between the film and the research theme was performed through the construction of three axes of reading: the mourning inherent to the process of adolescence; adolescence and Lacan's logical time and the impacts of capitalist discourse on contemporary adolescence. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The traveling of Chihiro represents Chihiro’s process of becoming a teenager, which is characterized by different mournings. Slowly, Chihiro lives the loss of a child position, as well as the several responsibilities that emerge from her life, such as the necessity to save her parents, the learning of bathroom operation and how to deal with different creatures in this new routine. The childhood parents, who were associated with a synonym of protection, gradually and painfully become fragile, making Chihiro elaborate herself in another subjective position, becoming an adult. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: The psychoanalytic analysis, enables a singularity view of such experience, showing the several aspects that cannot be limited to biological parameters.