The clinical study of Etienne, a 17-year-old adolescent boy, enables us to illustrate the positive, forward-moving function of moral masochism during adolescence, which maintains a sufficiently important conflict through the anticathexis of erotogenic masochism and of one of its highest forms, feminine masochism. The resexualization of mental functioning seen in Etienne's intellectual inhibition and academic failure, and in his masochistic complaints concerning this, attests to a lively conflict, thus saving the neurosis and opposing itself to the desexualization of sexuality, such as was manifested in Etienne's denigrated homosexual and heterosexual practices. The analytic work with Etienne enabled us to affirm the importance of the fantasy of having been beaten by the father, a fantasy which was repressed by the suffering inherent in moral masochism. Much is at stake in this conflict during adolescence, corresponding to the necessity to resolve the negative Oedipus complex in order to find again the functions of the superego, challenged through the recourse taken in the narcissistic ego ideal.