Traumatic experience in childhood can result in the establishment by the psyche of primitive defensive strategies for confronting the dangerousness of the linking.
Through the story of « Diana », we will see how a paradoxical dynamic can be set up in adolescence between the search for erotic linkings and the attack on these linkings, the goal of which is to eliminate all need for these linkings.
The clinical treatment of « dangerous liaisons » consists in the adolescents’ search for partners whose distinguishing characteristic would be that they maintain and repeat the deficiencies and traumas linked to the earliest environment. Paradoxically, these liaisons perform the defensive function of protecting the adolescent against genuinely loving linkings, which are perceived as much more dangerous because of the underlying threat of dependence.