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Pinel feels that the massive psychoanalytic bibliographies on adolescence reveal the limits of the countertransference space of analysts toward adolescence and indicate the urgency they feel to master this chaotic countertransference. The "discoveries" of the literature depend on the author's school of thought—Kleinian, Freudian, or whatever—and show the rigid application of a preconceived framework to something which is difficult to conceptualize. Pinel thus emphasizes the heterogeneity of theoretical and technical approaches to adolescence. He compares the society of adolescents with that of analysts and finds certain parallels, especially the precarious feeling about their social utility, their relative exclusion from and unfamiliarity with productive channels, a certain taste for truth, and an interest in ritual. In the course of his inquiry he is led to question whether the manifestations of the adolescent crisis fall within the framework of analytic competence, that is, transference neuroses. He sees adolescence more as an actual neurosis, in the original medical sense of the term, meaning an intoxication of sexual origin. It is important to recognize the actuality, in this sense of the term, of puberty and the physical transformations by which puberty is manifest. The author denies that he means puberty is to be placed on the same level as a physical intoxication, however. He suggests that we recognize that the idea of a confrontation between the fantasy life of the adolescent (of which we know little) and his pubertal transformations is merely a hypothesis; certainly, it is secondary to the brutal reality of these transformations. With Freud we are accustomed to think of adolescence as the time of the setting of genital primacy. But we must recognize that before this occurs, puberty is a transitory period during which psychic and physical processes occur without a link between them. The psychic processes leading to the establishment of genital pri