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A psychoanalysis unfolds in the best conditions when the patient is lying down on a couch and speaks to the analyst without seeing him. And yet, neither children nor borderline patients can associate freely in this position. They share the common point of not having emerged from adolescence. The end of adolescence may therefore be defined by the internalization of the attitude of adults towards children, irrespective of the violence of the latter’s unconscious desires. In the absence of this internalization of the attitude of adults, the protective superego is transformed into a terrifying imago that paralyzes the associative process. With some borderline patients, preliminary work face-to-face is necessary in order to break down this imago and put the elements of which it is comprised into a network. When these representations are not condensed but agglommerated, the breaking down of the imago reveals split elements, separated from each other by a “central phobic position”. The analysis must then be continued face-to-face. The technique of “punctuation”, invented by Lacan, might be linked to an imago that was specific to him, the “obscene and ferocious figure of the superego”.