[Crisis in adolescence]

The authors are reconsidering the usual notion of adolescence taken as a period of contest, as an awkward age, a period of crisis and of rupture. They successively examine the classical view of adolescence, some of the interactions between body and wind, the idea of crisis and the idea of rupture; and they put forward the following hypothesis: Adults--parents--educators--therapists consider the adolescent, struggling with his difficulties, with a defensive complacency which aims at eluding a reactivation of their own identification crisis; this is particularly shown in the interactions which, during this period, reactualize the conflicts about the organization of the genital as well for the adult as for the adolescent. They lean on a few clinical cases to back up their hypothesis and suggest that, in the treatments of adolescents or post-adolescents, a special interest should be taken in the presence or absence of a fantasy of rupture in correlation with rupture behaviors.