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Psychoanalysts have written much on adolescence in the last two decades so that it can now be said to have its specific place in psychoanalytic literature. This change
has come about through the development of clinical work with adolescents in psychoanalytic treatment. Work with adolescents and young adults places us at a crossroads between psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic treatment, on the one hand, and crisis intervention, work with families, and institutional work, on the other. We are thus forced to move from a focus on the internal world of our patients to a consideration of external realities which affect them. Still, adolescence is best understood within a psychoanalytic framework, which provides a more global view of the structural and economic import of these factors and at the same time limits the seduction of which adolescents are so readily capable. The problems of adolescence are well known: the urgent choices adolescents are called upon to make, their search for identity and the mirror that the peer group provides, the tendency to express conflict in conduct, and the use of the body as a means of expression of conflict. This relative importance of experience over thought leaves the therapist with the impression that the adolescent has a total lack of insight, although one is really dealing with the adolescent's active defensive counterinvestment of thought, linked with global sexualization of thought and representation at this stage of development. A second consequence of this ascendency of experience over thought is the involvement of the adolescent's milieu, especially the family, in his or her conflicts. There is a defensive character element here, too, in that one of the members of the environment may become a support for the projections of the adolescent. Adolescents use such an object to protect their internal world by means of a vehement focus on such external reality as the object provides. This is a sort of fetishistic use of