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This article is a clear and perceptive study of the organizing effect that first love has on the adolescent's psychological development and its influence on the adolescent's future object relations. The author sees first love as a sort of ritual initiation into adolescence, and, whatever its manifest expression, it can be considered an organizer of the psyche that marks the temporal entry into adolescence. Adolescents in the throes of first love are still enmeshed in an infantile libidinal organization to which they strongly adhere, without the protection of experience. First love involves a brutal narcissistic assault, with a violence done to the ego by an exterior object, which is all the more real because its qualities are, by projection, those of the mother in an unremembered past time of primary narcissism. First love is fragile and is likely to fade into despair at the slightest doubt which insipid reality foists on the suddenly sober adolescent. The hallucinatory wish fulfillment of first love is always close to the pain of an irretrievable loss. In this day of the telephone, it is interesting to see how the adolescent ego still finds indispensable the writing of poems or the keeping of intimate journals, as in times past. The adolescent also recognizes, much more than an adult, how this desire flourishes by not being