The adolescence, period convenient to acting out because of the internal and external reorganizations of the subject, is a period of paradoxes : need of autonomy and dependence, activity and passivity. It is  difficult for some adolecents to be at the origin of a request of care which places them in a position of dependence to the adult-therapist. The forensic treatments, one of the protective measures for minors’ court use, allow to make compulsory for the adolescents to follow a psychic treatment. The article discusses the place of this measure in the adolesent’ care through a clinical vignette which describes a fifteen-year-old male adolescent, set in a symbiotic relation to his mother, victim of physical violence on behalf of his father in his childhood and who, having shown himself violent towards his mother, threatens to kill the social worker who ordered his fostering in a foyer. The forensic treatment in the adolescence : constraint or support ?

Adolescence, 2011, T. 29 n°1, pp. 113-134.