Follow the “ pattern ” of youth in W Gombrowicz’s work, which shows the specific nostalgia of the adult gaze upon time that for him has passed : youth. He reveals the difference through which he grasped that event. Far from restoring the “ genital archaic ” present in the process of “ sexual differentiation ”, it is in the indifference of gender that adolescence is gripped. Masculine and feminine are indifferent as a pure form, beauty being faddish, and are claimed in the adult’s nostalgia as an observer of youth. Three aspects of this point of view qualifying the unconscious dimension at work in this “ pattern ” : the adolescent ideal of purity, the adolescent relation to excess, and finally the question of evanescence in its relationship with time.