This text discusses the analytic treatment of two young women in their late teens, grappling with the beginnings of their love lives and the difficulties of the separation process required during adolescence. These treatments allow us to examine the separation process of adolescence in relation to the work of mourning, or melancholia, and to ask ourselves what we separate from during adolescence. The question of the work of mourning, the work of adolescence, the work of therapy and the dream work shows how loving, working and separating, conceived as three possible goals of analytical treatment, are ultimately inseparable. With the presence of the body and the explosion of the instinctual drives in adolescence, the notion of work is situated, like that of drives, close to the body and always at the interface between the necessary renunciation and the indispensable displacement required to achieve a diverted satisfaction.