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Three papers were presented: Stefano Bolognini: ‘The bar in the desert: Symmetry and asymmetry in analytic work with adolescents and late adolescents’; Primitivo Gómez: ‘Interpretation and framing in the new pathology of urgency in adolescence’; and Álvaro Nin: ‘Some particularities in the psychoanalytic treatment of adolescent patients’.
Juan Manzano started the discussion by drawing attention to points of coincidence and difference between the papers. For him, agreement rested on clinical practice: ‘clinical practice is what unites and reassures us’. He pointed out that the first time period described by Gómez—that of pre-framing—is quite evidently presented in Bolognini's paper. Although it is conceptualized, as he says, in a different manner, it still refers to a first period that does not have to be interpreted. He stated that he has always been interested in the sociological topic of ‘adolescents in rupture’ (who have broken, in one way or another, with their surroundings). Then he referred to nomads at different moments in history, both to cultural nomads and adolescent nomads seen in Paris, Geneva and Bologna, who have the same characteristics; for example, they move from one festival to the next. He mentioned that an assistance program for these young people has been started that is almost word for word like Bolognini's concept of the waiter in the desert, someone who is at that place and offers help to these adolescents, who always have some need. He said that these adolescents were studied in Geneva; they are the ‘squatters’ who have been divided into different levels according to their break with reality. What is taken into account most is ‘how much reality they can accept’, ‘how much reality they frustrate’. A second point of agreement is that of time: a period is needed, so that they may accept a reality.
Manzano had a difference of opinion with Gómez and Nin over the introduction of the notion of a traumatic event, which he does not share. He said that