The purpose of the article is to integrate psychoanalytic knowledge on adolescence with the anthropological changes that have occurred in recent decades and that have had significant effects on the process of identity maturation.

Alongside the re-emergence of the oedipal dynamics, what takes place is a shift in the mental centre of gravity, from identifications with parents to the group of peers, which helps to address this detachment.

The group of peers not only fosters ego capacities for collaboration and friendship but also elicits deep unconscious resonances.

To illustrate the relationship established between childhood identifications with parents and the group of peers, the psychoanalytic therapy of Silvia, who felt victim of her classmates, who ignored and rejected her, making her feel a sense of fragility and a deep loneliness. The course of the therapy is illustrated, where the childhood and current dynamics with her parents and with the group of peers intertwined.

As is discussed in the conclusions, the identifications with parents, continue to guarantee a sense of stability of one's own self; the identifications that are built at this stage with peers, although fundamental for the development of identity, have a more contingent character and hardly last to adulthood.