The authors claim that psychoanalysis is the best treatment for severely ill adolescents. Their approach is centered on the developmental breakdown having taken place after puberty transformations leading to a pathological state. Such a breakdown prevents the adolescent from integrating gradually the sexually mature body in his psychological reality, thus conditioning a breakdown in his relationship to reality. These adolescents behave in a defensive psychotic behaviour without its being a true and definite psychosis. The developmental breakdown were to be re-lived along the analysis in the form of a ÇÊtransference breakdownÊÈ offered to severely ill adolescents.