Adolescence is passage, transition, mutation: it is no longer founded in the virtualities of childhood, nor yet upon the accomplishments of adulthood; it corresponds to a time of potentialities and is established in the category of the potential : adolescence is potential both in the sense of having potential and of being potent. The horizon of its questioning is no longer the enigma (as during childhood), nor yet the unknown (as in adulthood) but fundamentally the mystery, which beckons it toward an dynamic of initiation, questioning a possible revelation (unveiling and apocalypse). The psychical mechanism which rules the relation to the symbolic is no longer disavowal (which organizes the relation to sexual difference and to finitude in childhood) but denial (which corresponds to emergence of a secondary process).