Adolescence, a recent category peculiar to the West, tends to disunite puberty as a universal physiological event. It is not so much the disappearance of rites that is in play here, as the extenuation of the bond of solidarity between the phenomenon of puberty and the social designation – and treatment – of adolescence. Using the example of self-harming practices in adolescence, I would like to hypothesize an increase in acts/symptoms is fed by this separation and tends, paradoxically, to reduce it – i.e., reassert a social and private recognition of identity of the forms of otherness engaged by puberty – and at the same reject these same forms of otherness.

Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 47-56.